Why Online Reviews Matter to Service-Based Businesses

Think reviews are only for products? Think again. Reviews matter to service-based businesses too! With 93% of consumers reading online reviews before spending their money, the importance of customer feedback for service businesses is clear. 

Furthermore, in this digital age, consulting online reviews is an essential step in the decision-making process for most consumers. And while many business leaders know this, most still fail to understand exactly the difference they make when leveraged correctly.

Ways Online Reviews Benefit Your Service-Based Business

Over time, the presence of online reviews has increasingly proven to be a powerful marketing tool for building and maintaining a service business' reputation, attracting new customers and nurturing existing ones. In this article, we'll dive deeper into why online reviews matter and their impact on your service business's growth.

1. Reviews Help Build An Online Reputation

How customers view your business is greatly influenced by what others are saying through online reviews, testimonials and ratings. Even new or relatively unknown companies will be looked upon favourably by potential customers if their reviews are positive. This is because nearly half of all people trust online reviews as if they were written by friends or family.

2. Online Reviews Create Awareness for Your Business

Say you own a plumbing company, and someone in your service area wakes up to a blocked toilet. They grab their phone and start searching for plumbing services in the area. The best-rated companies appear near the top of the screen, and they end up contacting a company they've never heard of before but has an impressive average rating.

If this is your business, you've just made yourself a new customer through the powerful marketing capabilities of online reviews. For this reason, a company with excellent service quality will quickly become noticed once they invest in a review collection platform, especially one that integrates with both Google and Facebook – such as Hellopeter – to boost organic search.

Don't believe us? Studies have shown that nine out of ten (or 88%) consumers globally will read online reviews in the process of discovering a business in their area.

3. Can Generate More Sales

By using review platforms such as Hellopeter to compare similar services, customers can compare business ratings and reviews to determine their level of service excellence. The higher up your business on the rating rankings, the more desirable your business will be to potential clients, generating an increase in the number of customers who walk through your doors.

Service businesses who know this invest a great deal in meeting their customers' needs and getting feedback. Using an automated review collection tool like Hellopeter, you can prompt customers to rate your service after every interaction. And, as this is an embeddable feature, your customers don't need to leave their email to give their review. 

4. Feedback Keeps Employees Accountable

In a service-based business, employees are often known to customers by name. Knowing this, when you actively ask for online feedback from your customers, your employees will feel more accountable for their service and conduct. They'll know that their every interaction with a customer can affect their chance of receiving an employee reward or recognition. The end result? Excellent service quality and happy customers!

5. Review Build Trust

Reviews are excellent trust-builders, providing proof of satisfied customers. This is why 58% of customers are willing to pay more or travel further to do business with companies that boast positive reviews.

After moving to a new town, it's not long before you suddenly need to find your new hairdresser or barber. Say you find a place near you with great reviews but have doubts when you land on their appointment scheduling page. Suddenly a review of yet another happy customer catches your eye, and you decide to finalise the booking.

If your business similarly uses an online bookings page or portal, placing reviews on these pages will help nudge a potential customer into completing the process. Hellopeter's SEO-optimised widgets make it easy to showcase your best reviews on the pages of your site, where removing doubt is crucial.

6. Create Better Customer Relationships

By leveraging the power of online reviews, you'll be well-informed to be able to offer your customers improved service. On top of this, show them that you value their feedback and are interested in nurturing the business-client relationship by replying to reviews. This is an important step in nurturing relationships and winning over new clients. 

Why not make every interaction with your business as meaningful as possible with prompt responses to client feedback? On a Hellopeter plan, you'll get a notification as soon as someone leaves a review, so you can reply to every one of them and resolve any negative feedback so fast it'll make them smile.

7. Empowers You to Beat the Competition

To stay on top of how other businesses in your industry are meeting their customers' needs, regularly compare your reviews with those of your competitors. Doing so will give you valuable insight into where you need to improve and unique aspects of your business you can leverage.

To understand more precisely how you are faring against other players in your industry, you can use on-site analytics from Hellopeter to track your performance with various metrics and gain insights on customer sentiment through your Net Promoter Score.

8. You Can Improve Customer Retention

By simply offering a place where clients can voice their feedback and respond with a kind word, you're well on your way to enjoying repeat business and getting new clients, not only through reviews but word of mouth, too! 

Enjoy an Increase in Online Reviews

As a service-based business, where reputation is everything, reviews are paramount to your success. At Hellopeter, we get this and have helped plenty of service businesses grow their client base and build their reputation using online reviews.

Ready to steer your service business to new heights? Look at our plans and find out how we can help you get there. As South Africa's #1 online review management platform, Hellopeter has everything you need to get started.