Sales Hack – Customer Reviews

A Customer Review is the best tool to build trust in new customers.

This has been my experience in Beveragewala. We did a customer survey and an interesting result was that a lot of them (63%) said that customer reviews were most important for them in their purchasing decisions. This led us to starting a rewards program for our customers. We incentivized customers to write reviews by offering them reward points, which could be redeemed as cash in their future purchases. 

Reviews help build trust, not only on the product being bought, but also on the platform selling it. Since a business will always be biased about itself, a customer review tends to offer a more unbiased review about the business to new customers.

'Eat your own Dog Food'

This phrase implies that a company uses its own product or service in it's operations. If I claim that our product is good and adds value to the customer and if my company or any part of it falls into my target market, I should be my own customer.

Using your own product helps in identifying the benefits and shortcomings of the product. As a customer, we can know exactly where the product pleases me and where it needs improvement.

Also if I do not accept my own product, why will the rest accept it? This is one situation I had faced when I was working in the Business Development of Meenakshi Public School, a CBSE School based in Gurgaon. We had identified a particular target market based on income, location and background and nearly all our own teachers fell in it. We felt that we are providing a very relevant offering to our target market. However, on analyzing, we realized that hardly any of our teachers were admitting their children into our own School. On analyzing further, we realized that the teachers felt that there is a lot lacking in the offering and we needed to improve in a lot of areas. This kind of feedback was great for us since it was internal and hence comprehensive, and also since it was very relevant coming directly from our target customers.

To sum it up, if your company or any of it's team members can be your own potential customer, it becomes very important to become one or analyse why you are not becoming one.

Customer is King!

We don’t realize that our business is structured around 1 stakeholder, i.e. the Customer. And if it isn’t, it’s should be. The customer determines how a business is structured and how it operates.

Marketing: Our entire marketing effort is based on our customer’s behavior. Looking at our customer’s activites, we should analyse what channels will give us maximum visibility and should use the requisite tools to maximum sales. For example in Beveragewala, we knew that one large set of customers would be health conscious people. So we tried to brand ourselves in health blogs and sent our promotional material through affiliates operating in the healthcare space.

Operations: Our operations and supply chain systems should accommodate our customers’ needs. In Beveragewala, we got feedback that our deliveries were quite late in general. Based on that, we started using a faster delivery service (though it costed us more) to satisfy the wants of our customers.

Business Model: Bitequest was a restaurant reservation portal and we were targeting a premium clientele for it. Hence our business and revenue models were structured accordingly.

Hence, we must realize that our business is should be structured keeping our target customer as the centre. This will help create loyalty towards our business and will make the sustainable in the long term.

The Power of Customer Testimonials

In this era of high competition and crowded markets, a business needs something which is credible and make it stand apart. In a particular space, we see that most businesses try to grab a piece of the pie with the same messages and having similar offerings. From a customer's point of view, it becomes very difficult to decide which company to do business with.

Building credibility with customers is how open leads get closed. Companies write detailed descriptions about themselves and their offerings to woo customers. However, the modern day customer knows that these stories may not all be true and there always remains a doubt. Here customer testimonials can help a business stand apart.

Customer testimonials are tools which create trust because
- they are written by customers and not by the company itself. Authentication of testimonials is key here.
- an unbiased review by a genuine customer can help build a lot of trust.