The Importance of Trustpilot Customer Reviews for Your Brand

Having your website, service, or product reviewed can provide your business with valuable feedback. Whether it is positive or negative, the aim is to help improve the customer experience or understand what is and isn’t working well.

One of the most popular review sites is Trustpilot, with over 714,000 websites and over 167 million customer reviews. Businesses integrate this onto their websites to showcase how they are perceived by their customers, with it providing an overall star rating out of five. This also appears on Google searches next to a company’s search results to provide a snapshot of how customers rate their service or product, helping them to make a quick decision.

Due to the prominence of review sites like Trustpilot, and the fact the Trustpilot star rating is integrated into search engines, ensuring your brand is receiving a positive rating has never been more important. In fact, approximately 95% of consumers read online reviews before making any type of purchase, so if your rating is languishing below 4 stars this could have a huge impact on whether you attract new business or even retain the loyalty of your current customers.

As leading customer experience specialists, at Ventrica we know that customer reviews can make or break a business thanks to social media savvy customers and the ease with which reviews can be found and submitted. Here we take a look at how Trustpilot customer reviews can impact your CX and how you can start making the most of this feedback.

What is Trustpilot and How Do Star Ratings Work?

Trustpilot was set up in 2007 and is “committed to being the most trusted review platform in the world”, enabling any person to share a review about an experience they have had, or any business to use their platform to invite customers to leave reviews. Customers can leave a review for free, and businesses can start from a free business plan so that they can start collecting reviews and build a better brand reputation, before moving into tiered pricing plans with additional features. Similar to other review sites, as anyone can sign up and leave a review on an experience from the last 12 months, combatting fake reviews has also been a feature of why Trustpilot are one of the most trusted review sites, with them removing over 2.7 million fake accounts in 2021 alone.This is achieved through the use of fraud detection software to ensure authenticity and provide confidence in both customers and businesses that a fair reflection of products, goods, and services is shown. Once reviews have been left, they help to provide an overall star rating. The Trustpilot star rating is a visualisation of the TrustScore, showing a rating between 1 and 5. There are a few factors that influence this:

Age of review – the newer the review, the more impact it has on your score. Trustpilot will put a preference on newer reviews over older ones, as these are seen to provide a better insight into the current experience. If your reviews are ageing, this will impact the score.

Frequency –if you are not receiving regular reviews, your overall score and star rating can drop. Similar to the timespan, the most recent reviews are given more weight, so having a steady stream of reviews can provide a better score and counter ageing ones.

Average – TrustPilot confirms they use the Bayesian Average to ensure that newer businesses with fewer reviews to begin with have a fair start. 7x 3.5 star reviews are added to all calculations to ensure this. Once more reviews are gathered, these 7x take less preference on the overall score.

Businesses with under 10,000 reviews are recalculated after each new review left, whereas those with over 10,000 reviews have their score recalculated once per day.

As the Trustpilot review system asks customers to leave a review as well as a rating, this is then calculated in an overall score with 1 representing ‘Bad’ and 5 meaning ‘Excellent’. The closer to excellent your brand is (scores of 4.3 stars and higher), the better reputation it is perceived to have in the eyes of customers.

As Trustpilot say themselves, “businesses that regularly invite their customers to write reviews tend to have a higher

TrustScore than businesses that don’t.” This means that for brands to succeed with improving their overall star rating, they need a higher volume of reviews and the best way to get those is to actively seek them out.

How Negative Reviews Impact Your Brand Reputation

The importance of this rating means potential customers may ignore businesses with low scores, preferring to take their business elsewhere. Only 9% of customers would engage with a business that has an average star rating of 1 or 2 stars, with 38% of customers looking for at least a 4 star review.

Without those higher ratings, attracting new customers can be very difficult. During the Covid pandemic, 22% of people started writing reviews, whilst 31% of people read more business reviews than before. Reviews about your company’s service and products are actively being looked for and read, so your brand reputation is continuously under the microscope.

With 94% of customers avoiding a company because of its negative reviews, companies must be proactive to increase positivity around their brand and make improvements. If the customer experience is lacking, and the feedback you receive shows negative trends, addressing these as quickly as possible then collecting further reviews is the only way to improve the situation.

Why Trustpilot Reviews Are Important

The importance of Trustpilot reviews in the digital landscape cannot be ignored due to the scale of the reviews and companies featured on the platform. Trustpilot received more than 25 million reviews from July 2020 to January 2021, cementing its place as a leading review platform for many customers wanting to share their experiences. Brands need to work hard at turning the tide if they are currently under 4 stars. As there are many other review sites that consumers and businesses use, it’s important your CX is as good as you can possibly make it.

We all know that businesses can learn from the feedback they receive from their customers. By fine-tuning CX, this will not only provide a better experience for your customers, but also help to raise your reputation on reviews sites like Trustpilot. Here are some of the ways brands can start making a difference:

• Collect more reviews – if a company is not asking customers to leave reviews, it’s missing out on a big opportunity to increase its score. Reach out to your customers and make it easy for them to leave reviews.

• Improve the timing of reviews – the sooner you ask for a review after an interaction, whether it’s after a transaction has been made, or after a customer has asked about a product or service, or contacted you to raise a complaint, the fresher the experience is. Providing customers with an opportunity to comment and rate your service shows that you actively care about receiving feedback from them.

• Send reminders – not everyone will have time to rate their experience and leave a review immediately. By following-up via email or in-app messaging, you can increase the chances of receiving a review – customers sometimes have every intention of doing so but simply just forget, so there is always an opportunity for a polite reminder.

• Improve how you collect reviews – discover different ways to collect reviews. Whilst customers can leave these organically on the review site of their choice, you can create an account through review sites like Trustpilot and actively seek reviews. You can also look to implement other ways to make leaving a review simpler, including automated review widgets on a service page of your website, or through messaging apps, chatbots and email.

We help brands focus on the omnichannel experience at Ventrica, so they can provide a high quality customer experience to customers on their platform of choice. We can help your company become more customer-centric, to create more advocates and start boosting review scores across the board. To find out more, please contact us today.