By The real secret to operating a successful company is having customer testimonials. They give your business much-needed feedback and insights, enabling you to develop and improve.
Feedback and testimonials derive from various platforms – your product pages, website as well as third-party review websites.
If you gather testimonials from a third-party resource, there are several advantages, including developing a company’s:
- Transparency
- Conversion rates
- Dependability
However, there are a few disadvantages of letting everyone write company testimonials – particularly if they’re available to the public.
Below, we’ll look at the differences between closed and open review platforms.
Closed Review Platform: What Is It?
This is where validated customers are allowed to write testimonials. That is to say, the testimonials aren’t hidden – they’re accessible to the public, whether your platform’s closed or open.
Put simply, a closed platform’s only available to someone who’s bought a product or service from your business recently.
Closed platforms give you the power to:
- Have Control.If you dislike a testimonial, you can simply hide it or take it down so that no one ever sees it.
- Cherry-Pick. You can decide on who you want to invite, otherwise known as cherry-picking. You can select who gets to write a testimonial and who doesn’t by inviting your most satisfied or favourite customers to comment.
- Incentives: A lot of testimonial platforms enable businesses to incentivise to boost review rates (for example, with a £10 gift card to their favourite coffee shop). On closed review platforms, this happens in privacy. Also, you can offer reasons for writing positive testimonials only. And since it all occurs privately, the public won’t know any different.
Advantages of a Closed Review Platform
The advantages of a closed platform include:
- Honest Reviews. All responses are likely to be truthful and genuine. Some of the problems involved in an open review platform include difficulty in understanding how legitimate a bad review is, and your rivals writing negative testimonials. This isn’t as likely to happen on a closed platform because customers have to be sent an invitation to write a testimonial. Thus, you can concentrate on addressing and understanding the truthful reviews only.
- Restricting the number of false testimonials. With false reviews on the rise, it’s tricky to keep track of, erase or conceal each false testimonial. You won’t have to stress about false testimonials with a closed review platform.
- More Time to Resolve Problems. Using a closed review platform enables you to address problems swiftly, should a customer have a negative experience with your business. If you focus on responding to authentic customer testimonials only, this will boost brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Open Review Platform: What Is It?
An open review platform means anyone can write a testimonial about your company’s services or products. You’re still able to use an open platform to request reviews from validated customers, however, other reviewers can leave public comments about your company as well.
An open platform allows every consumer to read and write testimonials as well as offer testimonials for products, services, and businesses, irrespective of whether they were invited by the company to do so.
What’s more, all the comments are seen by the public. Providing the testimonial doesn’t breach specific guidelines – reveal personal data or use hateful speech – the testimonial is permanent. It can’t be amended, deleted, or manipulated by the business.
In other words, an open platform is one hundred percent translucent and offers customers an unrestricted view of reality.
Advantages of an Open Review Platform
Granted, opting for an open review platform can expose your company to susceptibilities like false testimonials. But there are several advantages to having open testimonials, including:
- A Larger Amount of Testimonials. With an open review platform, the number of reviews will scale rapidly. If the testimonials consist mainly of positive ones, you’ll receive more reviews, faster.
- Faster Feedback. An open review platform means it’s open to anyone in the public to leave a testimonial. So, you’ll mostly receive testimonials from authentic customers. Because your review process is open, it’s easier for customers to write testimonials. Ultimately, you’ll have more of an understanding of your product feedback and customer service together with processes. Thus, you can tweak your company strategies faster to tackle your clients’ problems.
- Short-Term Boost. For temporary outreach, request previous co-workers, partners, and clients to write testimonials without the need for them to make a new certified purchase. In doing so, you’ll see a quick rise in the number of reviews, indicating a decent product offering as well as dependability.
Whether you plump for a closed or open review platform is entirely up to you. But bear in mind the following: to gain more trust from your customers, it’s important to understand bad reviews to boost your trustworthiness as a company.
Open platforms enable anyone to contribute. Closed platforms don’t. The key is to consider your customers’ experiences.
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