The best reviews are personal, passionate, and reflect your consumer experience. They offer a rich narrative, a wealth of detail, and a helpful tip or two for other consumers. Here are some additional thoughts for conscientious reviewers:
Don’t make your review too short
Whether you loved or loathed your experience, other customers and the business want to hear about it, so don’t hold back! Lengthier reviews are much more valuable to others than short ones containing just a few words, as they usually have much more detail and highlight specific things the business did or didn’t do well.
So, take a little time to review and take some pride in it – do it well and it could really help someone!
Do include as many details as possible
The best reviews provide accurate information about a range of aspects of the business’ performance, including price, service, delivery, and quality. Whether positive or negative, you should back your review score up with as much information as possible to help other customers decide whether the company/product is right for them.
- Identify the Objectives of the Business Being Reviewed
- Identify the goals and objectives of the business you are reviewing.
- For example, to offer fun, flavorful, and economical meals to low-income families;
- to collect and shred confidential documents and records on a weekly basis for small businesses;
- to provide daily coffee and bakery kiosk services in the lobbies of metropolitan office buildings.
- Identify the goals and objectives of the business you are reviewing.
- Create a List of Memorable Elements
- Create a list of measurable elements that are pertinent to the type of business you are reviewing.
- If, for instance, you’re evaluating a catering company, some of the categories to address would be price, presentation and delivery, and the quality, taste, and freshness of the food.
- If you’re evaluating a consulting business, the categories would relate to the scope and diversity of services, fee schedules, time frames, the expertise of staff, quality of work product, and results.
- Create a list of measurable elements that are pertinent to the type of business you are reviewing.
- Evaluate Whether the Objectives Met Your Expectations
- Evaluate whether the company’s objectives met your personal expectations. Use our rating system to assign a numerical score of 1 through 5 with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest. For every score that is lower than 2 or higher than 4, provide a justification for your ranking.
- For example, you might praise the catering staff as being wonderfully congenial and efficient but point out that a substitution was made without your knowledge on one of the selections you ordered, and, in the case of food allergies, this could have been disastrous.
- Evaluate whether the company’s objectives met your personal expectations. Use our rating system to assign a numerical score of 1 through 5 with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest. For every score that is lower than 2 or higher than 4, provide a justification for your ranking.
- Determine if a Bad Experience was a One-Off
- Research whether a negative experience was just a one-time glitch or the norm for the business you’re reviewing. There may be extenuating circumstances you were unaware of.
- For example, a power outage that impacted the delivery of the product, a new hire who took longer to process a request than a seasoned pro, the death of an immediate family member in a one-person business or shop, or a relocation.
- Bringing a mistake or inconvenience to the attention of the business owner will often yield an explanation, an apology, and/or an invitation to give the business a second chance – all of which should be taken into account when writing your review.
- Research whether a negative experience was just a one-time glitch or the norm for the business you’re reviewing. There may be extenuating circumstances you were unaware of.
- Consider the Business’ Target Clientele
- Take into consideration the target clientele of the business.
- For instance, if you’re a picky gourmet who typically dines at upscale eateries, you’re probably not going to be enamored with a family-friendly restaurant whose waiters wear clown costumes. This is not, however, a good reason to criticize the entire venue. Because you’re not their targeted demographic, you need to put yourself in the shoes of families who are and evaluate whether the restaurant is a good value for their time and money and a fun place to take small children.
- Take into consideration the target clientele of the business.
Specific details about certain aspects of your experience will also enable businesses to reap value from your review and learn more about their customer’s happiness
Use proper spelling & grammar
Good reviews should be well-written. It’s important that they can be easily made sense of by other consumers, and proper spelling and grammar will help ensure this. To make sure yours is as accurate as digestible as possible, avoid using abbreviations or slang in your content. Text speak should also be avoided. In essence, we’d advise you to write your review as if you are writing a letter or an email to a company – keep it relatively formal in grammar and tone.
Give your review a timescale
One of the most important things in a review is that others are able to see when your experience with the company in question was. If it was a few years ago, and you’ve only just got round to giving them some feedback, it’s a good idea to make this known. Who knows – they may have made considerable changes to their business since then.
Your review can have a real impact on the actions of other consumers, so to make it as useful and accurate as possible, put a date on it. Likewise with times, as some businesses – especially restaurants or shops – may be busier at certain times of the day, or have rotating staff which may have influenced your own experience but not really reflect the business in question as a whole.
Be honest but fair
If the bulk of your review is negative, make sure that you open with a positive comment or observation. Other customers look to your feedback to inform them about all manner of things, from customer service call times to the fit of a shirt, so it’s essential that you are as transparent and honest as possible.
Simply explain what took place and leave it to readers of your review to draw their own conclusions. This might also mean that the company in question will be more willing to engage with you to address the problem.
Offer Suggestions for Improvement
Offer suggestions in your review on how the product or service could be improved. Strive for an equitable balance of fact and opinion in your content. Offer your view on what the company is doing well, and how they can improve. But keep things friendly and courteous!
Do not include non-relevant details
Just as important as including relevant details is making sure you don’t step over the mark. You should never include names of staff members at companies or non-relevant information or information that identifies people — such as names, phone numbers, or addresses, even if your experience with an individual is positive.
Do so, and your review may not be made public.
Keep it civil and friendly
We don’t moderate or censor reviews before they’re posted because we trust that the majority of our users have good intentions. But publishing a review online means it’s public. Therefore, the same kinds of rules apply to customer reviews as to any kind of published opinion. Being abusive in an online review is not going to be useful, and is likely not to be displayed publicly if it can be proven that any libelous remarks have taken place.
We know that sometimes businesses really get things wrong, and we’ve all been an angry customer at some point in our lives. However, it’s important to remember that the person on the other end of the line/screen is a human, just like you!