Devon Blog

Tag: review

  • Why did we create trustENGINE?

    1. Why we’re building connectchief…
    2. Every business should build its ecosystem for growth
    3. Why did we create trustENGINE?
    4. Why we are building promoENGINE?
    5. Why are we building flexxWORK?
    6. Why we’re building loyaltyENGINE?

    trustENGINE is an online review platform built by connectchief.

    Our vision with trustENGINE is to provide a neutral ground for customers & businesses to interact where customers can provide genuine feedback on thier overall service experiences with that business.

    Why businesses asked us to build trustENGINE?

    + Reduce fake reviews

    User reviews are a great way for consumers to discover good products, services and businesses. However, the democratic voice that reviews give to users is often exploited by those entering fake reviews. This creates a problem for businesses and users alike. Like in any democracy, you cannot eliminate bad actors but one can surely nullify their effect by having all citizens participate. By having all consumers provide a review, good or bad, the effect of fake reviews can be nullified. trustENGINE provides an unbiased platform for providing and collecting reviews. Our software engines are continuously tuned to flag and capture fake reviews. See more about fake reviews and how you can work with us to reduce fake reviews

    + Help proliferate the truth

    By getting reviews for any business or product in one place, one can provide a true representation of users’s feedback about the product or service

    + Accelerate the opportunity to receive feedback & improve

    User reviews are a great way for small businesses to know what’s working and what the business needs to work on to improve its products and services. trustENGINE has built-in data analytic and reporting tools that empower business owners to prioritize their focus on topics that can help them achieve the highest improvements in customer satisfaction and the best returns for the businesses improvement efforts.

    + A single venue for consumers to interact with the business

    There are quite a few social media platforms on the internet, each designed with the motive to build online social interactions. Most those platforms (Facebook by Meta, Twitter, Instagram, Google offer opportunities for consumers to tag a business and put a message. Because their central focus is on social engagement, these platforms do not focus on addressing the consumers & businesses needs to bring a unified view about the business. As entrepreneurs, we ourselves have faced challenges with fake and uncontrolled reviews, a lack of mediation & moderation controls, reviews being scattered across the internet and very limited analytics to help the business owner distill incoming feedback so they can focus on improving where they need to based on consumer feedback.

    + Promote reviews from verified transactions

    Business owners who were fed up with fake reviews preferred if there is a platform where the user can verify their transaction id at the time of entering reviews. This is a great way to build confidence in the overall reviews and ratings for a business. The larger the quantify of verified transaction reviews, the higher the confidence that the reviews reflect reality.

    + Build trust through transparency

    The goal of our platform is to build trust through transparency. Verified transaction reviews is a great way to ensure that real transactions are mapped to incoming reviews. We further enhanced trustENGINE with engines built in to flag and capture reviews that may be added by business owners to promote their self-interest. In addition, to ensure tranparency both consumers & business owners are required to comply with the trustENGINE guidelines to ensure fair, unbiased and transparent information being provided through reviews on the platform.

    What are the key things trustENGINE brings to the table?

    1. A platform that is open to everyone and focuses exclusively on collecting, managing and showcasing consumer feedback about a business
    2. Consumers can provide feedback on any business – at no cost to them or the business.
    3. A transparent scoring methodology where verified reviewers and verified transactions carry greater weight
    4. Artificially intelligent engines that capture and suppress reviews (with full transparency) that seem ingenuine. Our software is designed to fight fake reviews.
    5. trustENGINE puts transparency and open access to information first. Even if a business has a paid account on trustENGINE, they have no control over which reviews must be deleted.

  • How can businesses curb fake reviews

    Fake reviews are a huge problem for businesses.

    However, how can one stop fake reviews from popping up and misguiding our end users. Fake reviews come from many sources – jealous competitors, disgruntled customers or employees or anyone who may have any reason to benefit from your business not doing well. Fake reviews can misinform customers if not handled properly. However, the right attitude and approach to handling fake reviews can make your business shine out better than it would otherwise.

    We all want our customers to be reading the real reviews about our business, its products & services. And we need to know that fake reviews can be reduced but not avoided completely. So its best to remind all genuine users to provide a review, whether good or bad. Because reviews will help us do better and get our business do better over time. See our post here on why its important to get customers to write reviews about you.

    In our experience – there are a few simple steps that every business must take to curb the fake reviews about your services.

    1. Respond to every review

    When you respond to every review, your customers know you genuinely care. Your response needs to focus on the issue not the reviewer and never come across as defensive. Your goal with reviews needs to be to genuinely listen and learn

    2. Follow a good review moderation practice

    Reviews that seem suspect should be dug into. Ask for more context, information that can help you connect the feedback to a real interaction. Always operate from the premise that the review is not fake and make an earnest attempt to help the customer (thats why every business exists, to serve the customers). Requesting for information on things like the name of the person who the customer interacted with, items that were on the order, approximate date and time of the transaction etc can help you demonstrate to the community how genuinely you are interested in supporting customers as a business. With trustENGINE paid plans our team can help with guided mediations (in certain conditions). Our team on an ongoing basis can even flag reviews, reviewers or businesses that appear to be borderline fake / suspect.

    3. Promote reviews from verified transactions

    Try to tie every one of your reviews to a transaction or an interaction between the customer and your business. This practice of connecting most reviews to a valid interaction is ‘worth its weight in gold’. Verified transaction reviews = actual reflection of interactions with the business. trustENGINE can split business ratings to show your rating from verified transactions vs non-verified transactions. Non-verified transaction ratings carry a lower weight towards your overall rating.

    4. Know that you can reduce but cannot eliminate fake reviews

    Its hard to eliminate fake reviews, so its all the more important to ask all your genuine customers to review their interaction with your business. A best practice is to issue an invoice for every transaction. Each invoice must bear a unique interaction number (invoice number, transaction number, order number or other transaction ID that is relevant to your business) and a message to each user to share a review. trustENGINE is built not just to support online businesses but also brick-and-mortar storefronts. Using trustENGINE + connectchief tools you can encourage your users to provide a review or rate their visit experience from within the storefront itself. Reviews captured from within the storefront also carry information on the location where the review was provided (we capture location but do not display it) and further increase the likelihood of that review being tagged as genuine.

    5. Take an unbiased position when hosting your reviews

    In general, reviews that are self-hosted on your own website are not received well by customers. Customers find it to be less trustworthy when a business has full control over which reviews to display vs not on its website. As the saying goes, you can’t trust the fox to guard the henhouse (meaning Don’t assign a job to someone who will then be in a position to exploit it for his own ends.)

    Reviews are best hosted with a third party platform that has proper processes in place to ensure that reviews are unbiased, cannot be tampered with while there exists an opportunity for the business to make amends and improvements when negative feedback is received. The ultimate goal for a open for everyone reviews platform is to build trust through transparency.

  • Did you know? “Customer reviews are SEO magnets”

    This is follow up to our previous post on “Why is it important to ask your users for a review“

    Search engines are great ways to get customers to discover your business – whether you do business online or offline. Most small businesses with offline / in-store presences tend not to pay as much attention to asking their customers for reviews. Or if they do, they fail to manage the review collection, management & learning from feedback process.

    Customer reviews & feedback are one of the clearest ways to know what you are doing well and where we need to do better as a business. And user reviews & ratings are simply awesome when it comes to SEO for your business.

    • Reviews come from your customers – the reviews contain the kind of keywords that describe your business to them. More importantly, because customers write naturally and write about what they feel, they end up using language that’s similar to what people will search for when those people looking for your product, service or business. Simply put, reviews can improve your websites ranking for those search terms.
    • Reviews contain awesome snippets of text – that can help search engines use text for click-throughs to your website from search pages.
    • Customer Reviews & ratings are regularly updated – Search engines love regularly updated content. These reviews provide exactly the kind of content that search engines are looking for and because they are regularly updated, relevant and unique these help your SEO
    • Customer reviews are the social proof that your first-time consumers need – when they are trying to decide on either purchasing a product, a service or even visiting a business establishment.

    Almost everyone (unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock) today, relies on online searches to find businesses. So even if you do not conduct business online, you as a business owner need to focus your energies on collecting reviews from all your customers. These reviews are amazing tools to get search engines to present your business to customers as a relevant search result.

  • Why is it important to ask your users for a review

    In this technology driven age of online commerce, we all understand the benefit of product or business reviews. Regardless of whether your business is online or offline, you must focus on getting reviews.

    As a buyer –

    • By reading other customer’s review(s), I can make a more informed decision about the product or business
    • We can discover if people similar to us are happy with the product or business
    • Reviews can help us build confidence that we’re making a good decision
    • Reviews can also help alleviate any concerns we might have about the product or business
    • By reading reviews, a buyer can make a more informed decision that can help the user discover things about the product or business that identify better with the buyer.

    As a business owner –

    • Reviews bring credibility to my business. They help you build trust
    • Reviews can help increase sales – because they can naturally support a customer get comfortable around the idea of doing business with you
    • Consumer reviews build an online reputation for you business
    • Customer reviews can help you build up the SEO you need for your online presence.
    • Reviews provide the (neutral) social proof thats required to influence a new customers behavior
    • Reviews help you improve your product or service. Any aspect of your business that is consistently appreciated (or criticized) is a prime item for you to act upon. Do more of what is appreciated and do better about the things that are being criticized.

    trustENGINE by connectchief helps business owners collect unbiased reviews from their customers online or offline.

    Learn more about trustENGINE