Build Trust Amongst Your Customers Using Testimonials

In building a business, one of the key relationships between the business and its customers is trust. The customer should trust that the business is looking out for their interests and there is not an iota of questionability about the product. But building trust is more challenging than it may seem initially. Customers are generally hesitant to put their unwavering faith in a business with no credentials to back its claims. Testimonials from existing customers are a way for companies to communicate trust to potential customers and begin to address any hesitation they might have accumulated.

1. What Are Customer Testimonials?

A customer testimonial is a review or anecdote of a consumer who has purchased, used, and experienced a product or service. This review outlines the customer’s positive or negative reactions to the product in question and reflects on the entire business. Customer testimonials are often positive reviews of a company’s offerings, explaining how that product affected a customer’s life in overcoming an issue they faced. These are then available on a website, blog, or presentation for any potential customer to see and analyze and gain an understanding of the business through others’ experiences. Customer testimonials can be of different types. They are often recorded in text form, with the consumer writing an email to the company or leaving a review. Alternate ways of acquiring testimonials are voice recordings, videos, and selective quotes. Each type of testimonial helps build trust for the company and its products. You can use pre-made PowerPoint templates to build attractive customer reviews.

2. Why Are Testimonials Important?

Testimonials are key in proving the value of a product or offering by a company by providing the experiences of others who have also experienced the product. The subsequent testimonial acts as proof of value in terms of their experience, usually written in unambiguous language.
They provide legitimacy to a product or service to new customers who are more likely to trust a potentially unbiased reviewer than the company’s own careful and sometimes excessively flattering messaging.
They add an element of trust to the marketing of a product. A product with testimonials to back its claims is more trustworthy than one without.
Customer testimonials act as social signals for other customers to buy a product. In a market saturated with scams, substandard products, and con artists, testimonials can signal the product's legitimacy to other buyers and disprove its existence as a potential scam.

3. How Do You Gather Customer Testimonials?

Customer testimonials must be genuine and believable for savvy consumers to believe them. In today’s scenario, fake testimonials are all too rampant and can be identified by those familiar with them. To gather genuine customer testimonials, there are a few methods organizations adopt,

Interviews
Surveys
Giveaways
Social Media
Peer Reviews

3.1. Interviews

Companies often conduct interviews with their patrons to understand their experiences with the product. These interviews can happen in person or through email and other online methods. These interviews can yield quotes and statements from a consumer that can be used as part of business testimonials. This is often the most straightforward way to get consumer feedback for a company and legitimate testimonials for other consumers.

3.2. Surveys

Another method is to send out a standard survey to consumers of a company’s product, These questions elicit responses from consumers regarding their experience of the product, which, if positive, can be used as consumer testimonials. Interestingly, negative responses to the survey can be important in developing and modifying a product to suit every consumer’s needs.

3.3. Giveaways

This is a newer method to gain testimonials. Companies are employing tactics such as hosting giveaways for consumers that leave reviews and provide testimonials. It incentivizes consumers to share their thoughts to win a free product, and it allows companies to engage in trust-building exercises by using testimonials and giveaways to attract new customers.

3.4. Social Media

New entrepreneurs are aware of the power of social media and are willing to harness it to promote their products. Testimonials on social can work in two ways,

Sponsorships – A company can sponsor someone influential on social media to provide a good testimonial for a product.
PR – Sending PR packages to social media influencers with free products, hoping for a positive testimonial that potentially reaches their followers and directs new customers towards the company.

3.5. Peer Reviews

Many websites have cropped up on the internet whose sole purpose is to provide reviews of services, products, and businesses. These testimonials, or reviews, are written by ordinary people who have used a product and intend to tell others about it on a relatively neutral platform. Here, having positive reviews can make a bigger impact than having good reviews on your own website or company branding.

4. Where Can You Use Customer Testimonials?

Customer testimonials can be powerful tools to show you chops as a business by having standard PR and actual customers provide proof of competency for your company. So, using them in appropriate places where they enhance the image and confidence in your company is key to using them smartly. Some of the places where testimonials can be used are,

4.1. Websites

Having testimonials that speak to the good experiences customers have had with your product on your website is a great way to inform other buyers who visit your website about the legitimacy of your company. It also allows customers to understand how your product helped others with their problems and how it can help them with theirs.

4.2. Review Sites

These days, rather than relying solely on reviews on someone’s website, people often also check other independent review sites for authentic customer testimonials. As such, having customer testimonials on this third-party site can lend more authenticity to a review for your business than one featured on your business’ website.

4.3. Social Media

Customer testimonials have also found their way to social media, exposing them to a larger group of people. Having a positive testimonial available through one’s social media channel simultaneously allows potential customers to verify the company’s claims from the examples of other customers and work as a marketing tactic to reach a broader customer base.

4.4. Sales Pitches

While statistical information and data are important during sales pitches and presentations, having qualitative testimonials from real customers helps build the case for your product. Generally, numbers can be manipulated to present a rosy picture, and the audience knows it. So having a testimonial from a customer that does not have a vested interest in a company's profitability can provide a better frame of reference within a sales pitch on the efficacy of any product, service, or company.

4.5. Case Study Presentations

Similarly, when presenting a case study presentation for any aspect of your company, be it revenue and profit numbers, product response, or outreach, having testimonials alongside all the data can add a human element to the information, making it all the more believable and relatable to an audience.

4.6. Business Proposal Presentations

When giving a business proposal presentation, it becomes very important to market your company. You need to present your products and services in their best light and provide figures and content that communicate the utility of your product/service. As in the case of the presentations mentioned above, customer testimonials provide authenticity and legitimacy to your product.

5. Conclusion

Whether for marketing, or customer acquisition, customer testimonials are one of the best ways to grow your consumer base by demonstrating proof of experience with the product. They tell success stories and allow new customers to make their own conclusions about your product. People derive comfort from other people's confidence, and so Testimonials have and will continue to carry an important place in any enterprise's selling and marketing efforts.

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