I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about reviews lately. Since my conversation with Darren in the comments section of the post: Should You Pay Review Site Advertising Fees, I’ve been trying to figure out a convenient way to warehouse reviews on your own website.
To recap, Darren suggested that you should put reviews on your own website so that you can maintain ownership over them and thus maintain control over them.
However, you still need an easy place to send customers if you want to get that review written. You can ask while you’re at the customer’s home, as Darren suggested, or you can send them a nice e-mail after you’ve left the home. You can do a combination of both. But you need somewhere that they can go to actually write the review.
WP Customer Reviews is one way to do that. This is a simple Word-Press plugin that makes it easy for customers to leave feedback online. This is actually the same tool that’s being used on this page.
You get total control over what shows up on your site. The interface is very similar to the interface you’d use to reply to comments, approve them, or mark them as spam. Each review includes the reviewer’s email, which is a boon: you can use that e-mail to contact an unhappy customer in private and to meet their issue head on. This might save your customer, and it allows you to manage issues with them in a private way.
Because you’re dealing with the issue in private you don’t have to worry about “airing your dirty laundry” in public so to speak. A one star rating becomes an opportunity for a dialogue, not something which ensures you never get another customer again. It also becomes an opportunity to improve your business…sometimes negative feedback is something we do need to hear! And if it turns out to be something defamatory then you can simply mark it as spam and be done with it.
This tool is also nice because it doesn’t require your customers to create any extra accounts. This makes things pretty convenient for them! It also keeps them on your website a bit longer, building the relationship between you and that customer–not between that customer and Yelp.
This isn’t the only tool out there which can help you take reviews on your website, of course. Still, it’s easy, it’s quick, and it gets the job done without eating up a lot of your time.
What do you think? Will you be installing this tool or something similar on your website?
Try it here and let us know!