To help you discover the best ways to get your customers to give you a great testimonial, we asked customer service managers and business leaders this question for their best ideas. From offering awards as Incentives to making leaving a testimonial a quick and easy process, there are several tips that may help you adopt the right approach in securing great testimonials from your customers.
Offering an award incentivizes customers to take the time to provide feedback, and the additional attention can help ensure that the input is high quality. This approach can be very effective, but it is essential to consider a few things before implementing it. The award should be something that is genuinely appealing to customers. The odds of winning should be clearly stated, and customers should feel they have a fair chance of winning. Businesses should be prepared to act on the feedback they receive, as customers will be quick to notice if their suggestions are ignored. With careful planning, an award-based approach can be a great way to solicit feedback from customers.
Michael Sena, Founder & CEO, SENACEA
We have a special email that we send out to all of the customers that have Gmail email accounts to leave us a review on google. We will use the email as a template but personalize it for each of our customers. You already know based on their email address that they have a google account. We include a link that takes them to the right website to leave a review. This makes it as easy as possible. Our customers do have to go to an unfamiliar website they have never heard of and create an account or jump through any extra steps to leave a review. We have had a great amount of success requesting reviews this way. You need to make it as easy as possible for your customers to leave a review. You have to think that most of them are doing this on their phone and you want it to only take a minute or so.
Evan McCarthy, President CEO, SportingSmiles
Once you’ve identified a customer who’s enjoyed your services, you should provide them with any quantifiable metrics that they can use in their testimonial. For example, as a tutoring company that greatly depends on positive word-of-mouth, we provide our clients with their standardized test score baseline and end result to highlight how much they have improved because of our services.
Adam Shlomi, Founder, SoFlo Tutors
So much of marketing is designed to cast the widest net and in doing so it fails to connect on a human level. So, by personalizing your communication you can increase your chances of acquiring great testimonials. Marketing emails or promotions posted on social media may be effective advertising for your business, but does little to create a personal touch. However, by writing personal notes, following your customers on social media, acknowledging important days in their lives, and creating customized loyalty programs tailored to their interests, you can incentivize them to leave great testimonials when requested. In personalizing your communication, not only do you enhance the customer experience, but create an environment that is prepped for giving positive testimonials that can further drive sales.
Matt Miller, Founder & CEO, Embroker
There is a peak to every customer experience and journey. Depending on the service or product, this peak could occur during or even after the experience. When you zero in on these peaks and identify the ones that best apply to your lineup of offerings, you also know the best time to approach your customers for a great testimonial. Too early, and you may be jumping the gun on the opportunity and leave with a review that looks incomplete. Too late, and you may have allowed the excitement to die down. Time it right, and you will get your hands on a comprehensive, genuine, and heartfelt testimonial.
Azmaira Maker, Ph.D., Founding Director, Aspiring Families
You can set up a contest in which everyone who gives a review is entered into a drawing for a prize. Of course, you can’t stipulate that it has to be a good review – that would be cheating. The way you’re going to guarantee that they will all be stellar reviews is by delivering excellent quality and value on your goods and services. That part will drive the quality of the testimonials up, and the contest will drive the quantity.
Marcus Hutsen, Business Development Manager, Patriot Coolers
One of the most important parts of encouraging customers to give great and clear testimonials is to show them how much their feedback matters to you. People don’t want to put in the effort of crafting a review if it’s not going to go anywhere, or if it doesn’t mean anything. That means it’s important to show just how you plan to use your client’s testimonials. If you run a B2B business, you can provide link-backs to your client’s websites, giving them both a boost in SEO and publicity by being in your reviews. If you’re connecting with customers, you can provide a return for great testimonials, like a discount on a new service or an exclusive product as a token of your appreciation. Finally, if your testimonials come with feedback that’s critical of your company, don’t shy away from sharing it. Instead, use it as an opportunity to make your company better and publicly show your growth, so your current and new customers can see how much this feedback means to you.
Kyle Risley, CEO, Lift Vault
When running a business, I believe it’s inevitable that you’ll face some sort of inquiry, problem, or issue. Once an issue has been resolved, you or your customer service team should inquire as to whether or not the customer would be willing to leave a review of the company online. You can expect more positive feedback for your company if this is a standard part of your customer service procedure.
Kenny Kline, President & Financial Lead, BarBend
Your customers are busy people; they might not have the time to sit down and write out a full and thorough testimonial. Rather than pressuring a full, rushed paragraph out of them, ask for one-sentence feedback at regular intervals. Prompts like “Briefly discuss your experience with our service” and “Why did you first decide to work with us?” allow you to gently guide the line of questioning, which makes it easier for the customer to contribute. Asking for piecemeal feedback can take time, spanning over the course of several weeks or months. But after doing so, it leaves you with a much wider pool of valuable insights to draw from. Once you’re done, start connecting each customers’ feedback. Single sentences go together to form meaningful paragraphs, and these become solid testimonials which outline each customers’ objections, pain points, and aspirations. Slowly, and at a manageable pace, they share their thoughts. Then, you simply put them together. Everyone wins.
Max Wesman, Chief Operating Officer, GoodHire
If a customer has engaged with you about how happy they are with your service or product, the majority of times, they will be more than generous in making their feelings public. You can then try and direct their viewpoint to your advantage. As a SaaS-based company, we find that giving customers detailed guidance and instruction on what to mention in their review helps with specifics you wish to publicly highlight. You can then zero in and request them to mention particular aspects of your product or service that they found useful, or that describe their positive experience with your company. Make sure to thank them ahead of time for making the effort to write a review and let them know that you appreciate it.
Eran Galperin, CEO, Gymdesk
When you approach a customer for a testimonial, it is crucial that you first allow them enough time to share details of their feedback and experience. Only when you are genuinely interested in what they have to say can you take the next step of asking for a testimonial. This method tells the customer that their opinion matters to you. It also gives a window of opportunity to address any hiccups and change any negatives into positives. And finally, it leads the customer to offer a great testimonial that is genuine and upbeat.
Kris Harris, Owner, Nootka Saunas
The best tactic, in my opinion, is to make a model of the kinds of answers you’d like to receive. Your clients will appreciate the simplified procedure. Create a customer-friendly review form, and write it such that the consumer may swiftly complete at least part of it. Review writing won’t need much intellectual effort on their part. It may have some effect on how they answer, but that’s fine as long as the customer is happy.
Daniel Foley, Founder, Daniel Foley Consultancy
If your customers seem reluctant to produce great testimonials, it’s not always a matter of getting distracted or losing focus. What could be missing from the equation is a compelling reason to act. Business owners must understand that testimonials are transactional, and customers won’t write one if your solution remains unproven.
To encourage your customers, make the ask when they’re fresh off the heels of a big win. These are called “victory milestones”. If you solved a big problem that your customer was facing, take a minute to request their thoughts. Or, if they’re passing their first year in doing business with you, remind them of the occasion and encourage them to recount their experience. These milestones keep your business top-of-mind. By using them as prompts before making the ask, you remind the customer of just how far they’ve come since using your product or service. Always wait patiently for a victory, because greater success means greater testimonials.
Andrew Gonzales, President, BusinessLoans.com
Your customers lead busy lives, so you don’t want to ask them to spend a lot of time writing you a testimonial. Make leaving a testimonial as quick and simple as possible. Accepting testimonials via email or SMS will be convenient for most people. One approach could be to invite your customers to share their brief thoughts about your company in under 240 characters – the length of a Tweet. Also, posing an open-ended question or two can help your customers who might be stuck for something to say. For example, you could ask, “What do you like best about our brand?”
Leanna Serras, Chief Customer Officer, FragranceX
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