No matter what kind of business you’re in, the word review can cause a lot of anxiety and concern. After all, it’s one of the key ways to know how your idea is doing, and bad ones could mean substantial changes in strategy or even the product itself. Not all reviews are made equal, however, and different types can have different effects on your business and should be handled in different ways.
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Professional Reviews
A professional review comes from an individual or an organisation that makes a business out of their reviews. These reviews are more often well-researched, organised and carefully structured, and usually have to meet a certain level of standard due to being more legally liable for any misinformation. There are reviewers out there for everything from street food to online casinos and everything in the middle.
For a good example, you can look at one of the online casino reviewers mentioned earlier. If you take something like a Stake casino review, inside you can expect to see detailed information on the kinds of games available, what bonuses they offer, as well as summarised positives and negatives. Professional reviews like these, as long as they are fair, should be left alone; arguing a fair negative review is rarely a good idea for any business.
Customer Reviews
On the opposite side of the scale, customer reviews are something that you should absolutely be interacting with, ideally through some form of customer service expert. Reviews from customers are unfiltered, often brutally honest and, despite the massive potential for bias, carry almost as much weight as professional versions.
As harsh as some can be, keeping your business open to reviews from places like TrustPilot or Yelp means that you have another customer interaction point. Hiding away from reviews is rarely a good idea as it makes your company seem closed off to improvement, while positive interactions with them can be great for building rapport and trust with customers. People like to see companies owning their faults and working on them.
Aggregators
Within the world of reviews, aggregator sites are those that pool together multiple review sources, often both professional and customer reviews, to give an overall score. Prominent sites like Metacritic and similar services each use their own algorithm for weighting different reviews, and thanks to strict moderation, their ratings are usually seen as the most reliable benchmark. The specific methodology of each site is worth learning, however.
For instance, sites like TrustPilot that we mentioned earlier rarely, if ever, feature anything like a professional review, simply because there are few reviewers for businesses like banks or insurance companies. Always take your own TrustPilot rating with at least a pinch of salt. Those who have had a bad experience are sure to be more vocal about it, which will inevitably make your overall satisfaction level seem much worse than it actually is.
Reviews aren’t the be-all and end-all of your business success, and you shouldn’t be basing your entire strategy on them. With that said, reviews should only be completely ignored at your own peril!
