Strategies for engaging and retaining customers in a social and mobile world

Rating System Blog

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Push Notifications

Push notifications are one of the most valuable capabilities of native apps, and this capability is now available on the web. We can push notifications to your desktop when you receive a new Review or Question.

 

The Right Message, at the Right Time.

Our push notification is a message that pops up on your computer. We can send them every time your customer submits a review or asks a question using our Q&A solution. Your customer service team doesn't have to be in the app or using their device to receive them. From the Notifications pop-up end users can read, approve a Review or answer a Question as soon as your customer submits it.

Push Notification

Push notifications are sent to all devices and desktops registered to your account instead of a specific device registration ID, which ensures that your customer support receives all notifications on all of their devices rather than just one. The same notifications are accessible from any registered device and/or computer.

When an end user taps or clicks the Notification, the review approval view or question answer view opens, so you can reach your customers instantly. You can activate your push notification on Account Settings -> Notifications page.

Verified Buyer - purchased the product and wrote the review

A "Verified Buyer" review means RatingSystem has verified that the person writing the review purchased the product or service. A "Verified Buyer" submitted review through a specific process that clearly identifies those members who are submitting reviews of products that they own or services that received.
“Verified
These reviews come with a small "Verified" badge. This means we have confirmed the person reviewing it. Reviews that are not marked "Verified" are valuable as well, but we can't confirm that the product or service was purchased. Verified

Our process in nutshell:
Once a customer purchases a product or service, an email will be sent out within 7 days - a request to provide review for recent purchase. Seven days is the most common delay before sending these follow-up emails, but you can choose different delay up to 45 days in our system if your delivery process requires that. If you allow anonymous reviews, display a badge indicating "Verified Buyer" and provide extra transparency to your product reviews.
Verified buyers are asked to fill out a review via email and are taken to a page where they don't see any other reviews and aren't influenced by the reviews of others.

Our study shows that average star rating for reviews from verified buyers is 4.5 compared to 3.6 for reviews written anonymously. BTW reviews from anonymous customers have a larger percentage of one star ratings, anonymous customer more likely to give an even lower rating that they would initially to bring the overall rating down. Our study shows that more positive reviews are correlated with greater likelihood of purchase, and reviews from verified buyers are more positive overall.

Our "Verified Buyer" functionality is made with mobile in mind.

Is too many reviews bad or..?

Reviews offer benefits to the social commerce, and the importance of showing reviews across your whole product list is apparent. Don’t keep your traffic boost, conversion uplift and SEO tools strictly to just your most valued products.

Having a wide range of reviews is a no-brainer. But let’s not forget the depth of the review. It makes you wonder, what is the max amount of reviews that is beneficial, and which ones don’t really need to be there.

After doing some studies with Rating System’s clients, we noticed that there is not an actual ‘magic number’ for the amount of reviews on products, because ‘the more the merrier’, sort to speak, and the more beneficial each product will get. That is, if you make sure that it sends positive feedback in all forms of direction.

So why is review depth important?

Review depth has a huge impact on conversion is very straight forward. But why have such a big impact? A substantial amount of reviews allows segmenting the review content so you are able to show better information to your customers. Imagine having 250 reviews on a product, that gives time for the customer to find its’ specific needs.

Last but not least, the SEO benefit of the reviews is fresh content they provide for your products site. Having a handful of reviews won’t make be a big deal, but with 10’s/20’s, you are really putting a good difference to your website, unlike your competitors.

Make your reviews work for consumers!

In no matter what form, your first basic principle of social commerce is that it is successful, only if it works for businesses AND consumers.

Social commerce tools, such as reviews/ratings, recommendations and others are only able to boost business revenue because they’re useful for consumers, by giving them important information and more confidence in their product or service. This can only be done if all of these tools are attentively assigned to work well for consumers, present the correct features and be able to be used as easy as possible.

Basically, if you’d want your social commerce strategy to deliver absolute results, you have to critically think about the usability of the tools the business offers consumers. To make sure this happens, your team – or in some cases Rating System – recognizes how valued that is, and always applies it to every step of implementing and building your review solutions.

Below, are some of the main key aspects and features of that Rating System has come up with for a successful rating/review solution;

  • Make sure your reviews are easy to read and understand
  • Organize and sort your reviews, making it simple for consumers to find what they are looking for
  • Multi-dimensional ratings (mentioned in our previous blogs!)
  • Having some sort of ‘complete control’ of the types of reviews that can be posted; ex – spam filters, abusive words, etc.
  • Integrate products with a Questions and Answer box