How Trustpilot helps you improve retention and keep your customers coming back.

Did you know that 13% of consumers feel less loyal to brands and retailers than they did a year ago? Most brands are already struggling to increase customer loyalty and decreases like this can have a big impact on your bottom line, particularly if loyalty continues to drop. 

After all, 60% of loyal customers will share their favorite brands with their friends and family. This represents free marketing and growth for your business. And as any marketer knows, paid customer acquisition is extremely expensive and typically unsustainable. So how can your business improve customer loyalty and retention? And not only keep your current customers spending with your brand but also help them to advocate for your brand? 

Fortunately, customer reviews can actually take care of customer loyalty for you in a few different ways, a few of which most people don’t even expect. 

The connection between customer reviews and customer loyalty 

Good review management drives customer loyalty 

83% of customers feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints. Can you think of any other quick fix that would improve loyalty for such a high percentage of your customers? And all things considering, it’s a relatively low amount of effort for such a big change. 

Responding to customer reviews — particularly the negative ones — and letting them know you’re going to resolve their issues isn’t extremely time consuming unless your business receives a massive amount of reviews each day. And even if it does, you can use Trustpilot’s AI-Assisted Review Responses to make responding even faster. All you need to do is glance at the response, edit if necessary, and post it. Responding to reviews and building brand loyalty at scale has never been easier. 

For Battleface, monitoring and responding to Trustpilot reviews is a big part of their reputation management and customer retention strategy. And because reputations can change so quickly and frequently, reviews help businesses like Battleface stay on top of theirs. 

“Reputations can be affected overnight, so you have to really be there and communicate with your customers to make sure you’re managing your reputation.” according to Katie Crowe, Global Head of PR and Communications at Battleface. 

Best practices for responding to reviews

When you’re responding to your reviews, there are a few best practices to keep in mind. Some of these might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many businesses end up hurting their customer loyalty even more by not taking them to heart. 

1. Don’t get defensive or minimize any issues they’ve had. You’re not always going to agree with a negative review, but you need to be committed to resolving the issue for that customer so that they will potentially come back to your brand. 

2. Don’t leave the resolution offline. Once you’ve fixed any issues the customer has had, encourage them to update their review. You won’t want to ever pressure a customer to leave a happy review. But if you’ve gone the extra mile to resolve their situation, it’s helpful for their review to reflect that so that everyone online sees that, not just the disgruntled customer. 

3. Don’t resolve their issue and ignore the root cause. The first order of business is always to make your unhappy customer happy. But many businesses stop there. The key is to ensure that you learn from that as a business and ensure future customers don’t have the same experience. 

Continuously improve your customer experience 

If a customer has a bad experience with your business, the chances are you may never see them again. According to PwC, one in three customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience and 92% will completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. What impact would it have on your ROI if one in three customers that have a bad experience with you never return?  

Responding to your negative customer reviews might help resolve that particular customer’s problems, but what about the unhappy customers who don’t leave a review at all? How do you ensure that they don’t have a bad experience? 

Trustpilot reviews are a great way to understand how your customers feel about your business and keep an open communication channel with them. And investing in a platform to monitor your online feedback is necessary  to retain your customers. But the most successful businesses on Trustpilot are the ones who use their customer reviews to continuously improve their customer experience and ensure future customers don’t have the same issues. 

And Trustpilot’s Insight tools automate these trends for you. Instead of spending your time trying to make sense of your customer reviews and find the trends within them, our Insights tools do that for you, so that you can spend your time changing your business based on the trends we uncover in your reviews. Mazuma uses Review Insights to spot customer trends in their negative reviews as soon as the trend begins, helping them make necessary adjustments immediately before the problems start affecting more of their customers. 

And by making similar changes, LoveBook used Review Insights to see a 33% increase in their sentiment score, encouraging happier customers and driving more loyalty and retention for their brand. 

Are you looking to build customer loyalty and drive higher retention rates for your business? 

Request a demo today to learn how Trustpilot can help you