A guide on how to increase your website traffic, customer trust, and brand recognition by writing “optimal” responses to Trustpilot reviews.
To date, Trustpilot has over 31,000 registered businesses and 626,000 websites registered, making it by far the biggest review website on the Internet. With this scale and reputation, Trustpilot reviews have been verified as resulting in an increase in website traffic, unique clicks, and new customers. Some figures even show an increase of up to 500% for referral traffic and 35% more potential unique clicks!
Regardless of whether you’re just starting your business journey or you’re an established multinational brand, it is absolutely essential to manage and encourage reviews on Trustpilot.
Why are Trustpilot reviews so important?
When you’re making a decision about an online purchase, how often do you research product reviews and reviews of the business that you’re viewing? Probably quite often, and you’re not alone. In fact, over 93% of customers said they read online reviews from platforms including Trustpilot before buying products and services. Additionally, 31% of those same respondents said they would be willing to spend more money on a business with an excellent reputation. It just goes to show that having visible credibility in the online marketplace goes a long way.
Speaking of credibility, Trustpilot excels at maintaining its reputation as one of the most trusted review platforms out there. In 2021 alone it removed 2.7 million fake reviews during its “fraud crackdown”.
Due to its reputation and continued efforts to maintain trustworthiness, Trustpilot has been pivotal in the rise of e-commerce businesses to become one of the leading platforms for businesses to build their reputation and customer trust. Additionally, Trustpilot is great for businesses that do not have a physical store location, as you can still get reviews without needing to register a location-specific account (such as on Google and Yelp).
Why you should respond to Trustpilot reviews
Although Trustpilot reviews on their own are a great way for your business to show credibility, responding to those reviews goes even further by demonstrating that you actually care about your customers. There are additional benefits to responding to reviews such as:
- Increasing website traffic
- Encouraging new customers to leave their own reviews (the sheep effect!)
- Benefits SEO and increases Google rankings
How to respond to Trustpilot Reviews?
Unsure how to respond to your Trustpilot reviews? We’ve created a quick guide to get you started on this:
- Log-in to your Trustpilot Business Account. If you haven’t yet signed-up for one, you can do this for free here.
- Once you’ve logged-in you’ll be presented with your dashboard, which displays a top level breakdown of your current TrustScore and most recent reviews. There are different reviews depending on which type of business you run. Simply click on “Reviews” in the left column and if you run a service-based business select “Service Reviews”, and if you run an ecommerce business select “Product Reviews”. Of course, if you run an ecommerce platform and would like to see reviews for individual products and your overall service, you can view and request reviews for both!
- To make it easier to identify your latest reviews, negative reviews, or reviews without replies, you can choose to filter all of your reviews. You will see these filter options at the top of your review lists (see screenshot below).
- Once you’ve selected the review you would like to respond to, you can then write your response, or you can edit/delete existing responses if necessary.
- To make sorting and filtering even easier as you acquire more reviews, you can tag reviews according to their focus. For example, as an ecommerce brand you could mark reviews as “Customer Service”, “Checkout”, “Shipping”, etc.
Responding to a Positive Review
As mentioned earlier in this post, responding to positive Trustpilot reviews is essential to showing customers that you care about their feedback and that it is, most importantly, appreciated. Ironically, customers appreciate you showing your own appreciation for helping your business, which encourages them to purchase again from you and encourages potential new customers to purchase from you and leave their own reviews.
However, you must ensure that your response to a customer’s review is personalised and sincere. It’s no good just saying “Thank you!”. That just comes across as lazy and very “cookie-cutter”. Instead, acknowledge their feedback and thank them for taking the time to leave their positive review. Furthermore, you can also thank your repeat customers for their loyalty and give them a friendly reminder of any offers or discounts that you may have.
Acknowledging a customer’s feedback involves highlighting or reaffirming the points they mentioned in their review. For example, if a customer says “I really loved the service I received from Tom in Customer Support and I love the products”, you could respond with something like “Thank you for your review and we’re glad you were happy with Tom and your order! We’ll be sure to pass-on this feedback to him.”. It’s a very short response, but it really makes the customer feel like you have actually paid attention to their review, whilst simultaneously demonstrating to potential new customers that you take all feedback seriously.
In addition to the nature of your response, the speed of your response is also key. Whilst it is acceptable to respond to reviews within 48 hours, it is generally best to respond within 24 hours to prevent any customers feeling like they have been neglected, which could potentially affect future loyalty.
This point will be mostly relevant to businesses dealing with customers in multiple territories, but another point to note is that you should always respond to reviews in the same language used by the person leaving the review. Customers are far more likely to engage with businesses that are able to communicate with them in their native language, as it shows respect and leaves an even more positive impression of your business.
Review Sharing
This point deserves its own subheading as it really helps to generate hype and traffic for your business. A handy feature of Trustpilot is their automatic review sharing tool. When you receive a positive review, you have the ability to share these to your social media accounts with just one click! It’s a great way to get quick and easy content, and further-boosts your business acumen amongst your social media followers.
Responding to a Negative Review
Although it’s never nice receiving negative reviews, responding to them can help to boost your business’ online rating, and by responding to these reviews it can help in potentially turning them into positive reviews. Addressing customer concerns and paint points demonstrates to potential customers that you are willing to go that extra mile and look after your customers should they run into any issues.
The best way to respond to negative reviews is to get the perfect balance of respect and assertiveness. Essentially, you do not want to appear dismissive of a customer’s concerns, but you want to show that you’re going to direct them through the complaints process, whilst ensuring that you deal with their complaint in a fair manner. Responding in this way shows that you’re sympathetic and that your team is on top of everything.
One thing to note is that if the complaint is of a more serious nature or if personal details are involved, it is best to take the conversation away from the public eye. Respond to their review on Trustpilot by letting them know that their complaint has been logged and that a member of the team will be reaching-out to the customer directly. Trustpilot actually has a tool built-in which can allow you to automatically send an email directly from the Trustpilot page.
Examples of Good Responses to Reviews:
Example 1:
In this example, a bank has responded to their customer by addressing their concerns in a friendly and professional manner on the same day. Although it looks like they were not able to fully resolve the customer concerns, the response shows empathy and provides a path for the customer to have their complaint resolved in the form of a contact email being recommended for the correct team.
Example 2:
The next example isn’t necessarily a “bad” review, but the 3-stars out of 5 shows that the customer isn’t fully satisfied. The company has responded by demonstrating appreciation for the positive words in the review whilst also acknowledging the shortcomings of the business.
Example 3:
This final review is a great example of how to respond to a more serious complaint. The business responded on the same day, acknowledged the customer’s concerns, and asked the customer to provide their contact details via the private messaging system on Trustpilot. It demonstrates to this customer and potential new customers that even when things go wrong, the business cares about the customer’s concerns and is proactively seeking to resolve the complaint.
Common Mistakes in Trustpilot Review Responses
We mentioned this earlier in this post, but the most common mistake when responding to Trustpilot reviews is to use short or generic responses. It is very easy for customers to spot generic reviews, and for new customers it creates a sense of distrust. The best way to avoid this is to take the time to read the customer’s reviews and craft an appropriate response utilising the points raised earlier in this post. It may take a few additional minutes, but those additional minutes can really boost your business profile longterm.
Generating the Best Trustpilot Reviews
Understandably, if you have a small team or you’re receiving heaps of reviews per day, the time taken to respond to these can escalate. To help with this process, there have been multiple AI generators created by various providers that can produce unique, personalised responses to each customer, saving time and resources. However, whilst these responses can be fairly high-quality, it is still best to review these responses first to ensure that they match your brand “voice” and to make sure that no serious complaints are being missed.
