We all know the importance of online reviews.

Public reviews play an important role in the decision making process for customers – from small businesses to large corporations.

While visibility tactics can help shape awareness of your business and educational content can help keep your customers informed and updated, online reviews can often be the location where customers will ultimately tip for (or against) moving forward with a buy/hire action.

This obviously means they carry significant weight, but beyond this they can – and should – be viewed as an important feedback mechanism that can help shape your services or products.

Analyzing Your Reviews

I’ve mentioned this often on this blog, but one of the longest-running rules of thumb for reviews is that you’ll get them the most from two segments of customers:

1. Your most delighted customers.

2. Your most unsatisfied customers.

I like to think of this as expectations exceeded or falling short, essentially.

If you go above and beyond expectations during a service or product experience, the positive reviews kind of take care of themselves – they’ll be more than happy to offer a review and even recommend your small business in other locations (online or offline).

If you happen to fall short of expectations and the experience left a customer (severely) wanting, then the review becomes reactionary — a place to vent frustrations; not an ideal situation, especially for small businesses.

Positive Reviews

Looking even closer at your positive reviews, for most small businesses I’ve worked with there are usually some patterns that emerge or words often repeated that you can use to both improve your service or products.

Having those words echoed in the words of your customers can also help you shape your digital marketing messages to set expectations for future customers.

Negative Reviews

Negative reviews are never easy to receive.

However, you should view them as opportunities, rather than taking them personally.

Sometimes negative reviews are unfair ( especially if they are false or misleading, spam or are harassing ), but when reviews come in from real experiences it’s an opportunity to improve.

Whether it was an expectation that wasn’t met or a gap exposed in your service of product experience, it’s a learning opportunity to improve those gaps.

As mentioned there is always additional context sometimes unfairly missed with negative reviews – unique or uncommon experiences can happen, but like positive reviews that have patterns, so to can negative reviews – in that case it can be a point of focus for you and your team to work on.

Expectation Setting

Going back to the rule of thumb above for reviews, exceeding or missing expectations will ultimately lead to the generation of reviews for your small business.

Whether you want to exceed expectations – or avoid missing them – it all starts with setting them from the start.

The process of setting expectations is often started before a customer ultimately reaches out – whether they have read your marketing materials (online or offline), heard about you through a referral or even from reading others’ reviews.

After they get in touch with you, of course, communicating those expectations becomes the important part.

I’ve often found that if there’s a mismatch in initial expectations against eventual expectations (perhaps a delay with a project or product delivery), if the communication of that mismatch is on point, it reassures customers and re-calibrates their expectations so you can still pick up a positive review.

Review Generation Consistency

Without reviews or feedback, it’s awfully hard to understand where your product or service sits with your customers or market in general.

This is why it’s so important to ask for reviews, consistently.

There isn’t a single business on the planet – large or small – that can’t benefit in some way from getting reviews.

Getting reviews consistently means you’re consistently exceeding your customers’ expectations – something to be proud of.

If reviews are quiet, it could indicate some items that could be improved to help tip them from “satisfied” to “elated” so they come in at a faster clip.

If reviews are coming in that have less than stellar feedback – it might hurt for a bit, but ultimately it’s fuel to improve your services and products.

So, the next time you are studying your reviews, what are they really telling you?