Reviews: Ideas & Conversations

In our last two blog posts, we talked about how reviews can power our marketing efforts and how bad reviews can be opportunities in disguise. If you haven’t read them then go check them out and we’ll wait (again) for you to come back. We’re happy to wait. We’re here to serve.

Now that you’re back, let’s dig into how we can use reviews to generate ideas for new products and services. At the end of the day, reviews are a conversation between you and your customers after they have used your product/service. This feedback isn’t just on how you did but also on what more you could have done.

Let’s pull that apart a little bit.

Ideas from Reviews

In our last blog post, we discussed how a bad review is an opportunity to improve. Even if you felt like you did everything correctly, a bad review is a chance to look at all the customer-facing pieces of your business that lead to this negative reaction. From the purchase process, shipping, product, to customer service, something went off the rails. That negative review is not only an opportunity to right the wrong but make sure that the wrong doesn’t happen again.

But what if the product or service didn’t do what the customer expected it to do? What if what they had in their head was different than what was delivered? What if the customer was telling you about a service/product that they want but is different than what you are providing?

Reviews can give companies insight into other services/products that customers want. Customers are looking for solutions to pain points, right? You build a product/service to solve that pain point. Reviews can highlight other pain points that you aren’t currently solving. It might be a variation of a current solution but that’s a whole new solution and a pain point to solve. As well as another revenue stream.

Reading between the lines on reviews, you can start to see the outline of a new product/service that is needed. No need to iterate on something established but instead create a variation of your current solution to meet those needs. Think of it as antibiotic ointment and antibiotic ointment with pain relieving cream. One is good to put on a blister while the other is good to put on a cut. Both are solutions to two different pain points.

What are your reviews secretly telling you?

Reviews are the Start of a Conversation

We tend to think of reviews as a one-sided conversation where a customer has given us feedback. Yes, we reply and acknowledge the feedback but that’s where it tends to end. What if we didn’t just acknowledge the feedback but asked further questions? I’m not talking about some stupid customer service survey where we ask people to rate our company on a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is strongly agrees… blah, blah, blah.

Surveys are not a conversation.

What if we replied to the review and asked them if the product/service solved their problem? If we asked them what their expectations were before the solution? If there was a way that the solution could address their needs? If there were other problems they were having that we might be able to help them with? How crazy would it be to ask our customers to help us help them?
I don’t think it’s all that crazy.

All my solutions come from talking to clients. I talk to them about what problems they are having and find ways that I can address those problems. But after a project is done, I’m not very good at following up and see what other problems I can help them fix. I know that they have problems and I can create solutions to solve them. I’m missing the boat on providing more services to my clients because I am not taking the steps to engage them beyond the original project. Yes, my customers reach out to me when they need help. We have that kind of relationship that invites future business. But I’m not actively seeking that future business when a project is finished. I’m going to be changing that starting now but, until now, I haven’t been.

Let’s start thinking of a review as an opportunity to continue that engagement and see if we can tease out new solutions/products as well as more business from them when a project is over. It’s all about shifting our perspective.

What’s Up Next

What more could be said about reviews, you ask? Well, the big one that we actually haven’t written about: social proof. In our next blog post, we’re going to talk about how reviews are social proof, how to generate content from reviews, and how we could use reviews to evangelize our customers.

See you next weekish…