Any business or individual selling a product or service understands the value of acquiring a high number of customer reviews. In today’s extremely volatile world of online business, customer testimonials can very easily make or break a business. Every business puts together lots of time and other resources to market their brand. However, all these initiatives would have little impact if you are not doing enough to maintain and protect your online reputation. Unfortunately, just a few negative reviews are enough to deter your prospects. However, it is possible to build-up a systematic process that can generate positive reviews for your business spending minimum amount of resources.

Trust building is the one and only factor that makes online reviews so important for your business. As many of you must have already experienced, it is extremely difficult to build trust online. It is true that people expect businesses to post customer reviews on their website. At the same time, today’s smart customers tend to put their trust on social review platforms such as Yelp, City Search, Yahoo, Kudzu, Google Plus, etc. Being third-party sites, they are known for their unbiased customer reviews.

Here are a few things that you can do to get more customer reviews

• Request the customers to post their reviews.
• Provide links to different review websites
• Customers may not post a review on your initial request. Therefore, do not hesitate to follow up.
• It helps to train the staffs on asking for reviews from the customers. If possible, create an incentive scheme.
• Be extremely polite and patient while asking for customer reviews.

These days, it has become a common practice to use the service of different companies that help their clients receive a large number of customer reviews. However, unfortunately, most of these companies drive the reviewers to their own website instead of sites like Google or Yelp. The disadvantage of using such sites is that all your reviews will disappear as soon as you stop using their service. Therefore, if you ever decide to hire a review company, opt for one that drives the reviews to the third-party review websites.

To sum up, it must be said that online reviews will not only help you build trust in the online marketplace, but also makes your marketing and lead generation efforts more effective. Also, there is no better alternative to building, maintaining and protecting your brand identity.