Why Consumers Buy: The Importance of Verified Customer Reviews

You can forgive yourself for overlooking it, because the Pew Research Center’s annual Online Shopping and E-Commerce report was released at the height of the 2016 holiday shopping season. The report is the result of a survey exploring an extremely diverse swath of platforms and digital tools and how they influence US adults’ purchasing habits and decisions.

While the report’s insights are comprehensive, some of the more interesting takeaways focus on the importance of verified reviews. Customer reviews, when deemed trustworthy, wield huge influence over shopping decisions, and this, in turn, represents a tremendous opportunity for brands that can leverage customer reviews to better inform prospective customers.

1. Consumers Depend on Reviews

Not only do U.S. adults embrace online shopping, but they rely on “social proof” to make informed decisions about what to buy. In fact, almost three-quarters of consumers told Pew that it is important to be able to seek advice from people they trust when they are shopping for something they haven’t purchased before.

About as many consumers also said that it is important to be able to read reviews when making first-time purchases. What’s more, about 82% of American adults said they actually read reviews before they purchase something for the first time. This all serves to emphasize the impact that reviews have on customers’ purchase decisions.

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Given how strongly reviews influence consumers’ decisions, brands have a major opportunity to increase sales conversions by being part of the conversation. Tomer Tagrin, CEO of Yotpo, a platform for collecting and amplifying customer reviews, recently said, “The companies growing like crazy and floating above the noise are the companies who leverage their customers and their experience with the brand.”

This trend isn’t limited to shopping online, however. How often do you find yourself in a physical store looking for reviews about a product you are interested in, using your mobile device? You wouldn’t be alone. Nearly half of all respondents said they do the same thing, and that statistic goes up to 62% for 18 to 49 year olds.

Another strong theme running through the report is that younger consumers are more likely to shop online, refer to reviews, and even use less cash for their purchases. This isn’t particularly surprising, but it is a trend that brands should pay careful attention to and plan for.

For example, when you consider the 18- to 49-year-old age group, bear in mind that 87 to 90% shop online, 64 to 77% shop using their mobile phones, 62% have used their phones to look up reviews online, and 47 to 53% report “always/almost always” reading online reviews when making a first-time purchase. Consumers in this age group are more digitally savvy, so it makes sense that they’d be more accustomed to referencing online product reviews when making purchase decisions.

2. Reviews Have Gone Social

As you might expect, a relatively small proportion of American consumers actually write reviews, compared to those who read and rely on them. Roughly half of consumers surveyed “sometimes” create their own reviews of products and services (with just under half reviewing restaurants).

Social platforms, moreover, have become especially convenient channels for consumers to share their experiences of products and services.

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Facebook has revamped its business pages to facilitate better interactions between brands and their customers. By adding call-to-action buttons to your Facebook page, you give your fans and page visitors specific ways to interact with you based on your goals. For example, a “Shop Now” button is a great way to guide B2C consumers to your online store. Use a “Learn More” button to send visitors to your B2B lead generation landing page where you can give them more information about your business and gather their details for follow-up by your sales team.

Facebook Messenger integration through your Facebook page is a great way to connect with visitors. Messaging gives you an opportunity to privately respond to any concerns or questions prospective customers may have. When you respond to messages quickly, your page will give consumers an indication of how responsive you are; this is a great way to manage expectations.

You can include a “welcome greeting” that sets the tone for the conversation going forward. You can also set an Away Message for those times when you aren’t able to respond as quickly as you’d like to. For even more examples of how top brands and entrepreneurs are getting creative and adding new “buy buttons” to their sites and social profiles, see this resource article.

Twitter, meanwhile, has also upgraded its Direct Messages service to add a degree of automation and personalization to customer service interactions. Welcome messages help kick off conversations with consumers through preformatted messages. Then to guide conversations even further, you can add a series of quick replies that help identify the nature of the query, for example. One of the first brands to adopt this new interface was Evernote, via its Evernote Helps Twitter account.

The benefits of Twitter’s welcome messages and quick replies include reducing the duration of your interactions with customers and directing the flow for more efficient management of support queries. Ultimately, these are features that speed up the problem-solving process.

Roughly half of 18 to 49 year olds have used social media to share their experiences or feelings about brands on social media. Contrary to popular perceptions that only bad reviews are shared on social media, 86% of Pew’s respondents said they have talked about their positive experiences with brands on social media; by contrast, only about three-quarters of respondents did so after negative experiences.

3. Credibility Is a Real and Complex Issue

Even though the majority of consumers consider reviews to be important, they aren’t convinced that they are credible. Only about 65% of consumers who “always or almost always read online ratings” believe that the reviews they turn to are consistently credible and accurate.

In another telling figure from the report, only about half of consumers who generally read online reviews at all say they believe that reviews “give an accurate picture of the true quality of the product.” At the same time, about 48% of respondents also said they find it difficult to tell if online reviews are truthful and unbiased.

These statistics flip when you talk to respondents who only sometimes read online reviews. As with other findings in the report, perceptions of credibility tend to improve with younger consumers, which leaves brands with another challenge: satisfying older consumers that the reviews they refer to are, in fact, accurate and credible.

There are a few ways brands can reassure prospective customers that the reviews they read are legitimate. One effective option is to make use of a trusted, third-party review platform that is only open to verified customers. Another option is to introduce an element of social validation into customer reviews. Consumers are more likely to trust reviews published by customers they know. Transparency is important, and accessible reviewer profiles also help prospective customers determine how much weight to give reviews.

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Almost half of those Pew surveyed reported that having customer ratings and reviews available helps “a lot” to put them at ease about their purchases. This is nearly double the number of people who feel that applicable government regulations protect them. About 45% of consumers also reported that customer reviews keep companies accountable, whereas only about a third of the survey’s respondents felt the same way about government regulations.

What this tells us is that customer reviews are not only helpful when assessing a possible purchase. They are also a powerful factor that keeps brands honest—even more so than the law. This, in turn, instills greater confidence in consumers about those brands and their purchases. 

Conclusion

Regardless of whether consumers shop online or in physical stores, reviews are an increasingly important part of the purchase decision-making process. Although the overwhelming majority of consumers surveyed by the Pew Research Center rely on reviews, a smaller majority find reviews to be credible. The resulting credibility gap is an opportunity for brands to step in and address concerns that online reviews may not be truthful or credible.

Another interesting, yet unsurprising, insight from the report is that the more engaged consumers tend to be younger and more connected. This speaks to a changing market and more opportunities for brands looking to leverage reviews as purchase decision influencers.

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