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Honest Marketing report - Banner image

### Brand integrity: the new frontier for marketing

[Get the report here](/guides-reports/build-trusted-brand/brand-integrity-the-new-frontier-for-marketing?cta=banner)

Get more out of your customer reviews with our case studies, webinars and videos. Find the latest trends to promote your company in search and manage your online reputation.

Learn From Your Customers - Trustpilot Webinars and Videos

Webinars and Videos - Learn From Your Customers

Bad Reviews Happen - how to respond

Reviews Happen - how to respond

In this Trustpilot webinar, we discuss the importance of responding to all reviews, good or bad. If you’d like to learn all the best practices, tips, and tricks for responding to reviews, watch the recording.

If you don’t have one, facing a barrage of customer feedback can be overwhelming. 
 
It doesn’t need to be. We simply have one main tip: respond to your negative reviews. Respond now. 

If you’d like to learn all the best practices, tips, and tricks for responding to bad reviews, watch our webinar recording below.

## Bad reviews: how to handle them and why they're better than you think

So firstly, an introduction to Trustpilot. Trustpilot is a leading online reviews platform. It was launched in Denmark in 2007 and launched in the UK and the US in 2013. In that time we've become the top 1% of most visited websites globally. We get over 4 billion brand impressions every month, and we currently sit in on 100 million customer reviews!

We aim to be a universal symbol of trust and for a trust symbol to be trusted, you should work for both companies and consumers and be independent of both. That's really important because our vision has always been to help companies and consumers, not one or the other. And that's what separates us from other review sites. They are about reviews as an eCommerce tool, we're about that too, but it's about trust and open collaboration that creates trust.

The three pillars of the business through our powerful customer feedback software are get seen, get better and get sold. That's our value proposition, and it's pretty simple. 

### Negative reviews happen

I think the first thing to say is essentially, I'm sure we all know this as either just being a consumer or working for different businesses that no business is perfect.

So naturally, by inviting people to leave feedback, you are going to get a few negative reviews in there, just by the very nature of being in business. But actually what you can see on here from these stats from the different research and studies that we've done, is that's not actually a bad thing. What consumers want in the UK in particular is they're looking for a real, authentic, good company that cares about their customers.

Most consumers now understand that it'll almost impossible for brands to have only five-star reviews. Being a real, authentic company, and just accepting that you are going to get few bad reviews in there, is the first step to success.

### How to handle negative feedback

Over a third of consumers expect a response to their bad reviews. If you think about it, you've asked them to leave a review, they've taken the time to do that. So the least you can do is respond to it.

When people leave feedback, they're not just having a rant online about their bad experience. They're leaving that door open, and want you to respond, engage, and start a dialogue with them. They're hoping you'll listen, help, and learn from it.

### What kind of response do people expect? 

64% of consumers would actually prefer to buy from a business that's responsive over one that just potentially seems superficially perfect. People want real responses. Everyone's human. They just want a real human on the other end of that business, responding to them and they just want you to be understanding, and helping. Consumers are actually three times more likely to buy from a company that has made a mistake if they responded to their review quickly, and tried to rectify their mistake.

So, if you think about your own business, what effect that could have on your bottom line? If more consumers are three times more likely to buy from you just because you're showing how much you care about their experiences by responding to all of their reviews, good or bad, you'll likely convert more, and get more repeat, loyal customers. 

You've got a few bad reviews, you've responded to them, in a real, honest, genuine way. That means 55% of people would actually shop with you again. 

And that's not it. One in four people would actually go out of their way and recommend the company if they took the time to fix the problem. So, even if the overall experience may not have been fantastic or seamless, just from being a real, genuine company that obviously cares about their customers, well, one in four would actually recommend the company. Isn't that fantastic?!

### Tips and tricks to respond to bad reviews

So, this just hits on more about the relationships with basically their consumers and companies or brands have now. And I think more and more, especially with obviously the rise of social media, 

- Consumers want the brand to be as human as possible. It's important that you're not just responding like it's an automated message, but taking the time to understand their issue and to them.
- Using their name and signing with yours is important too. 
- If you can personalize the message further, that's great.

Oasis Fashion is a great example of a brand which responds to every reviews. They just send their customers a very quick, very simple response, just thanking them for their great feedback, which is always great for the consumer to have. If they are to receive a negative review and they frame it up in a very professional, very swift, very effective manner. They do not engage in an argument with the consumer because from a new consumer's perspective, looking in, that's only going to come across as negative.

So, they front it up, they apologize and they offer to speak to the reviewer privately. And that's really important. And it's a really, really good example of how you can turn a negative into a positive and how you can learn from it from a business. And you can keep that customer.

### To sum up...

Just going to run through in summary now why it's important to keep your current customers happy for the lifetime value of these customers. So the four top tips, first things first, yes, you should respond to reviews. There's nothing worse than burying your head in the sand and expecting them to go away. It's crucial you respond to your reviews.

Your Trustpilot profile page is a valuable marketing asset for your brand. By responding to your reviews you can showcase excellent customer service, reward your customers for leaving back and encourage future interactions with your client base. So, positive, personal interactions with customers increase brand loyalty.

Secondly, online versus offline. So we recommend that you leave one response to every review, don't turn it into a chat thread. If you want to continue the conversation with the consumer, let them know you'll get in touch with them privately, or provide them with an email address or phone number to contact you.

Thirdly remain professional, keep it professional. I know it's really difficult if you've got a review that's completely bonkers, but if you lower yourself to using rude, hurt or offensive language, it's going to reflect really poorly on your brand. You should also avoid sharing too much personal information. Save that for the private correspondence.

Finally retain the relationship. So you view your response as an opportunity to acknowledge the reviewer and to save them as a customer. According to LinkedIn, it costs between four and 10 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. So, strategically and financially it's best for your company to actively work on the upkeep of your existing customer relationships.

And by responding to reviews, warmly, and professionally, you could improve the buying experience. You can reaffirm your relationship with your customers and you can show the transparency of your brand. And that builds trust the Trustpilot way. 

If you'd like to learn more about Trustpilot reviews and how they can help you build trust with new customers, check out our newest guide below!

Bad reviews happen: A strategy of when and how to respond

How to make customer satisfaction your key differentiator

In this Trustpilot webinar, we discuss the importance of reputation, and why it can be the deciding factor on whether or not a customer ultimately decides to buy from you.

Managing your reputation and understanding how and why customers feel the way they do about your company takes a customer-first approach. By considering your customers in nearly all aspects of your business, you’re ensuring all decisions are being made to accomplish the same goal: making customers happy and keeping happy customers.

In the mortgage lending industry, customer trust and satisfaction is an absolute. Prospects coming to mortgage lenders are making a major life choice and they can’t afford to make the wrong decision. With such an intimate and life-changing opportunity, how a customer feels about a mortgage lender should be considered across an entire company. This kind of thinking is what led HomeBridge, one of the top 10 mortgage companies in America to come to Trustpilot to start collecting reviews.

HomeBridge adopted a customer-first strategy and identified three major goals:

- Establishing credibility with clients
- Streamlining customer success processes
- Track benefits accrued from an improved reputation 

## Learn How Trustpilot Can help You Increase Your Organic Search Traffic

By working with Trustpilot to automate their review collection, HomeBridge was able to learn from their customers’ feedback, improve their service, customer experience, and also gain tangible benefits such as an increase in traffic and an improved reputation.

To learn how HomeBridge was able to achieve success this way, check out the recorded webinar below!

4 Things every business owner should know about the state of reviews

staying on top of your reviews

In this Trustpilot webinar, we share best practice tips on responding to good and bad reviews, and show you how doing so can help amplify your customer satisfaction.

Online reviews and customer ratings have become a real testimony of how your business will fare in the market.

Negative reviews are inevitable, but that doesn't mean it's the end of your reputation.

In our new webinar, '50 Shades of consumer: how to stay on top of your reviews', we'll discuss how you can benefit from the feedback you received, both negative and positive, and drive your business forward. 

Watch the recording, and learn:

- The benefits of responding to reviews
- How to respond to positive and negative reviews
- 8 Tips for improving customer satisfaction
- Reporting for the right reasons


50 Shades of Consumer

50 Shades of consumer: how to stay on top of your reviews

Driving Lifelong Customer Devotion 

In this Trustpilot and WPromote webinar, we dicsuss the importance of customer loyalty in today's era, and how to drive lifelong customer devotion with the right campaigns.

Join Trustpilot to learn how to inspire lifelong customer devotion with an inspiring customer experience.

You’ll also discover which brands are currently #winning with loyalty campaigns, and how you can replicate their success. 

The hallmark of the webinar is what we refer to as “the holy grail of customer experience” - advocacy. When customers start doing your marketing for you, your sales will compound, and compound again. The quickest sales cycle is the referral. That’s why reviews are so effective. Social proof inspires other consumers to make more purchases. 

Take our directives to launch your own loyalty campaigns, and maximize your wins with loyalty. Watch our webinar recording, “Driving Lifelong Customer Devotion,” now. 

Driving Lifelong Customer Devotion With Loyalty Campaigns Video

## The importance of social proof and customer engagement for scale-ups

So for those of you that don't know, Trustpilot is a leading online reviews platform. In the 13 years since we actually launched in Denmark in 2007, we're now over 700 employees across seven offices globally. What does that actually mean in numbers? So every month there are over 3 billion brand impressions on Trustpilot online. So what that means is we're actually the 29th most visited website in the UK. So globally we rank about 506. The people that are visiting Trustpilot are able to look through over 100 million customer reviews. So these are 100 million stories of other people that have done businesses with a company, and it allows people to make a better informed purchasing decision when they're looking at buying a service or buying a product or choosing which company they should invest in, for example.

Now these figures are great, but what does Trustpilot's growth look like right now? Well, every two seconds, there's a new review posted on Trustpilot. That equates to about 2 million new reviews every month. So that 1.7 million is actually interesting because over a million people each month are writing their first review on Trustpilot. So that just shows our growth. It shows the importance of reviews. It shows the importance of that social proof. And these reviews are on over 400,000 businesses. 

### About Seedrs

Seedrs is one of the leading equity crowdfunding platforms. They are actually the first platform with a fully functional secondary market and also an investment automation. In 2018, they were named the most trusted global equity platform globally. Interestingly, over 650 institutions have invested in Seedrs portfolio companies, which is an impressive number.

Seedrs often get asked what the difference is between crowdfunding and other platforms? So the three main types of crowdfunding, there is the reward crowdfunding where money is exchanged for perks. Then debt crowdfunding, where money is exchanged for interest returns. For example, Funding Circle is one of the platform that is doing debt crowdfunding. And then there is equity crowdfunding where capital and investments are exchanged for shares in private companies.

The second question that is also quite common coming from entrepreneurs is why are businesses considering equity crowdfunding as a revenue stream? Well, there are different reasons. Of course, the first one is capital. So businesses need capital to grow. But there are also other very interesting five reasons why business are considering crowdfunding. The first one is marketing exposure. So you might not just need capital for your business, but you want to have brand exposure so that you can acquire new customers and engage with those customers. So customer engagement is another reason.

### Why customer engagement is key 

Customer engagement is also key, because at the end, your goal is also to convert customers into investors. And that's where engagement and social proof and validation are key. So having mentioned validation, that means that if you go into a platform like Seedrs and your campaign is successful, you get the validation from the market, from your investors, that your business proposition is good and that it's worthy of investment.

And then finally, entrepreneurs are also looking for speed and efficiency in raising the capital, and there have been a few companies on the platform that have raised capital in the first day or two days, so they hit their target, in terms of the capital that they raised. An example is Revolut. You can see on the slide.

Now, talking about customer engagement, validation, social proof, I think really leads very well to the next section, which is the report that Trustpilot published a few weeks ago, based on a survey of over 140 startups. 

## The importance of social proof today

Now on that report, we actually [released the report](https://uk.business.trustpilot.com/guides-reports/build-trusted-brand/the-importance-of-social-proof-in-fintech) in line with London Research. So it was around the importance of social proof for startups and scale-ups. And for those of you that aren't aware, social proof is basically social influence. So it's being influenced by other people, their experiences, and in this scenario, it's ratings and reviews. So I just want to share some of the key findings from the report quickly before we go into it in a bit more detail.

So of the businesses we asked, 92% of them found that reviews or ratings were important or critical when converting new prospects into customers. Now on the other side of the fence, these same people also found that positive reviews and social proof were important or critical when generating interest from investors as well. So in this situation, it's not surprising that if 83% of the people are finding that it's important from an investment point of view, but 92% are finding that is important or critical from converting their prospects into customers, 64% of the businesses we asked had actually been asked by investors to provide customer-centricity points, proof points such as ratings or reviews, or they proactively included them within their investment deck. So investors are asking this question as well, and they're asking to see this information before their parting with that money, before they're making that investment.

Now, the next set of statistics I actually find really interesting, because we asked these same businesses what they find their biggest differentiator is. And I think the figure I like most from this report is that 46% of them found that customer experience and customer service were their USP. That was their unique identifier. That's what made them different, with only 38% of them believing it's products or innovation. Now, if customer experience and customer service is your biggest differentiator, then social proof, reviews, ratings, really allow you to leverage that to help you win more business, to help drive those conversions, or whether it's from an investor point of view, to help gain that investment.

And it really links in to the other statistics you're going to see here on the page, because you can see 7% believe brand awareness, 5% believed online reputation. Now, social proof really encapsulates all of these things, because your online reputation is what people are saying about you. It's how well-known your brand is. And all of those things really roll into the same thing there. Now, one statistic, one figure I really didn't find surprising was that 4% of people believed that price was their differentiator. And the reason it's so low is because people... I don't know whether other people on the webinar will agree listening today, but you're more likely to spend more money on a product or service from a trustworthy company, from a company that you think are going to treat you the best, give you the best service or product. And so only 4% of the businesses found price their differentiator.

Now this links back in to the key findings. So in the key findings, we found that 92% of people found that reviews were important or critical when converting business. Now this really breaks that down. So it shows you the breakdown between quite important at 10%, important at 47 and critical at 35. Now the figure I actually wanted to focus on was the 8%, because 8% of people still believed that reviews or ratings positive weren't actually influencing their prospects to become customers. Now, if 92% of businesses were saying they were, and the investors are looking for that, it begs the question of... Well, I thought that figure was quite high, to be fair, but it tends to be moving in the positive direction.

### The importance of customer reviews to investors

So now I want to look at the importance of social proof customer ratings to investors. So with investors, they're really looking at you're providing a good service that people rate highly. And what we've found more and more often is that they're turning to social proof to prove this. So 83% of the businesses, of the startups and scale-ups that we actually surveyed, found that positive reviews and social proof were critically important when generating interest from investors.

And this links in quite nicely to YourParkingSpace. So YourParkingSpace use Trustpilot customer reviews on their website to help convert new businesses, and help build trust in their brand. But they also use it within their investment decks. So whenever they're going to a body to gain investment, they'll always provide their reviews or their Trustpilot score within that investment deck as well, to help add that validity to the investment they're looking for.

Now, like many people on the call, sometimes your investors can also be your customers. So I myself invested in Monzo. So I'm a Monzo customer, and also a Monzo investor. And the quote here from Richard Cook says that, "People who have backed us want to talk about our latest scores and what we are doing to move them in the right direction because they understand new customers want a good reason to sign up to a challenger bank. They don't come better than positive ratings and reviews."

Now this personally for myself is quite true, because before investing in Monzo, I was doing a lot of online research. So I'm not your typical investor. I'm just an everyday investor. And I was looking into, okay, what are people saying about Monzo? What is Monzo doing as a business? What are they trying to achieve? And ultimately, what do their customers think? Because a business only exists to provide a service or to offer something. And if that service is good, if the feedback is good, then it's a solid investment.

### Conclusion: customer experience rates above innovation

To sum up, the research found that customer experience rates above innovation. It rates above brand awareness and price when it comes to winning new customers. Now, on the other side, it also helps provide compelling evidence that a company is answering a consumer need with a popular service. And in turn, that helps stand out as highly investible. 

Now, based on these two statements, it comes as little surprise that nearly two in three of the companies surveyed revealed that they had been asked to provide ratings scores or they proactively decided to include these, like YourParkingSpace do, in presentations when seeking funding. 

So it really just gives you the holistic overview of how social proof can help from a consumer point of view, but also from the investment point of view. 

The importance of social proof & customer engagement

Evolve your customer service with our new Zendesk integration

Zendesk Webinar Header

In this webinar, we discuss how the Trustpilot & Zendesk integration makes customer communication easy. We’ll show how brands using Zendesk can install a Trustpilot channel side by side with their existing channels to manage communication in one place.

And with Verint research claiming *"85% of consumers say good service affects their buying behavior,”* producing excellent customer service can lead to a high return on investment. the return on investment of promising great customer service is certainly high. That's why Trustpilot has partnered with Zendesk, one of the biggest names in the customer service software industry, to create a brand new and exciting integration for our customers.

Our webinar will show you how the Zendesk integration makes customer communication a breeze. Step by step, we’ll show how companies using Zendesk will be able to install a Trustpilot channel side by side with their existing channels (*i.e. email, phone, social media*) to seamlessly manage customer communication in one place. Also, we’ll showcase how reviews below a particular rating can be converted into a Zendesk ticket, meaning you can dive deeper into customer feedback.

With this integration, ensure you hit your customer service goals every month. Check out our webinar recording below to see just how easy it is to evolve your customer service using our new Zendesk integration.

Evolve your customer service...

### Who are Zendesk?

So to just get started, first to those who may not be aware of what exactly Zendesk is, some of you may not be using Zendesk in your business, but perhaps you have encountered it as user when submitting questions or requests to businesses you may work with on a day-to-day basis, whether that's in your personal life or your professional life. Zendesk is one of the biggest customer service and support ticket companies in the world, which is no surprise why over 75,000 companies globally, big brands such as Tesco, Vodafone, Xerox, et cetera, et cetera, entrust their customer service with Zendesk.

Here at Trustpilot we're also a Zendesk customer, and we use the software on a day-to-day basis to manage customer inquiries to our support team, as well as all internal requests to our IT team. And our support team is also actively using this integration to manage our own Trustpilot reviews. So that's another reason why we're super excited to share this integration with all of you today on this webinar, because it's something that we really value on our day-to-day work and has really increased our efficiency working with Zendesk and with our Trustpilot reviews as well.

### How to evolve your customer service with the Zendesk and Trustpilot integration

So to jump into how exactly can this integration benefit your customer service. So first and foremost, it's probably not a surprise of how important customer service is. It's a no-brainer these days. 

Customers will only stay loyal to a company if they have a very good reason to. Otherwise, there's so much competition in the market these days that they could choose to move on to. And as a result, companies these days need to work even harder to keep their customers and to build trust in your brand. And not only is great customer service an indicator of trust and to reinforce your brand, it also really, really can help drive ROI. In fact, according to variant research, 85% of customers say good service affects their buying behavior. So having that really great and strong customer service is not only a great way to engage with your customers, but it's actually a massive driver of revenue growth for your business.

So before we release any of our products, we always do a discovery phase to get insights from beta customers before we launch the product across our global customer base. And one of our customers from a company, RC Willey was one of the first customers to trial the integration. And just to hear it basically from his own words, he has said that it's a massive time saver and it really, really simplifies the communication process and the review management process. And so we wanted to just hear from the customer before we dig into the actual core benefits and walk through the live product demo.

### Benefits and best practices when using this integration

First of all, to streamline all customer views and one organized place. Yes, of course, all of you who are using Zendesk, I'm sure that you all really love it because it's really easy to work in and you get everything in one place. 

You get to reply publicly to reviews directly from Zendesk. How awesome is that? You get to streamline all the workflows for your support staff as everything stays in Zendesk. And also, all the automations, the triggers, the workflows, the macros, et cetera, that are in Zendesk, they actually also work with the new Trustpilot channel. 

That means it's becoming more efficiency and time saved on handling Trustpilot reviews, and more time to engage with your customers directly on Trustpilot.

Boost efficiency for review management. I'm sure that many of you have agents maybe asking for a report on how much time they are spending on replying to reviews. With this cool integration, you save time by setting up automated triggers for selected star ratings. Therefore you can be more efficient about your team's time management for review replies by setting up actions on the star ratings you have chosen to interact with. For example, you can select which domains you want to integrate with and what star ratings you want to reply to. Maybe some of you have more than one domain in Trustpilot and therefore, maybe right now you're only really spending time on one of the domains. And that is the domain you would like to integrate into the channel. Also, you can automate and save time again by triggering, "Thank you for your review. We really love positive feedback," for all your four and five star reviews. And the same time, you can set a priority to all the one and two star reviews to be set as urgent, so they are the first to be handled for your support agents.

The increased visibility on time spent on replying to reviews. As I said before, maybe you as a manager, you want to have a much more clear overview of how much time you are spending on replying to reviews, because definitely it is an investment into your overall reputation. But as a manager, you get a clear reporting on how much time your agents actually are spending on replying to reviews. You also get to see what type of reviews your teams are spending most time on responding to. That could lead to more coaching on specific topics, etc.

Then the last thing is to duplicate your existing Trustpilot tags into Zendesk. Hopefully you're all using our very cool feature where you can tag your reviews to monitor your customers' feedback. When you're doing that, I'm also sure that you're also, as of today analyzing a lot of the tickets that you do receive. And what I want to say here is that by duplicating the tags from the Trustpilot into Zendesk, you are making sure that you have the same data across systems to track on. And I think that is really cool, and that is something that we have done here at Trustpilot as well. And I highly advise you to do the same.

But how does it really look like when you receive a review? We have done some testing of course, to showcase this for you. For example, earlier today, we received a one-star review. "I never received my order." When you receive a review like that, you, of course, want to do something about it. So what we decided here at Trustpilot, is that when we receive a one or two-star review, we want to set the priority as urgent. You can do that with our integration.

So just to take you a little recap on the best practices. 

You can set these triggers based on star ratings. 

Hopefully, you're already replying to all star ratings. It's what works best, and you look way more professional and trustworthy when you do that. 

With this Zendesk integration, you get to set the triggers. You can also create your macros. So you don't need to spend that much time on all cases. 

And again, by duplicating your existing Trustpilot tags into Zendesk, you're really ensuring that you get the same data. And you all know how the C-SAT works in Zendesk and put that together with your Trustpilot review tags, you're only enforcing the whole knowledge about the customer journey, which we all know is so important and a very touchy topic at the moment. 

If you'd like to learn more about our Integration, check out the page below:

Learn more about our Trustpilot & Zendesk integration