How do users reviews increase the retention and boost sales

Imagine you want to try Italian cuisine and there are several restaurants in your city that serve it. Both are in a good location and the photos show a nice and cosy interior. But one has a much higher ranking on Google Maps and the comments are full of rave reviews about the food, drinks and quality of service. I think we can guess which one you'll choose.

A positive evaluation of your services by your customers is a direct confirmation of the quality of your brand. According to a BrightLocal survey, 91% of people say that local reviews influence their perception of large businesses. It is therefore important not only to provide this option, but also to convert it into a sale and increase customer loyalty.

So, let’s catch the insights now!

Today, customer reviews are more than just a way to express your opinion. They form an active community around a brand, actually voting for or against the services and products your restaurant or online shop offers. We treat asking for reviews as a form of primary market research, giving you direct access to understanding what your customers really need.

Customer reviews play an important role in building trust and influencing decisions across a range of industries:

One of the reasons for this increase in revenue exceeding integration costs is the expansion of product distribution channels. IoT in retail market serves as a bridge between online and offline, keeping users engaged throughout the checkout process.

Google remains the dominant platform for consumer reviews, maintaining its lead as the most used site. While platforms such as Facebook and Yelp are still in the top three, both have seen a decline in usage, with Yelp experiencing a sharper drop. Tripadvisor and Better Business Bureau have also lost significant consumer interest, probably due to their industry-specific focus.

The global trend shows that consumers often consult multiple platforms when evaluating local businesses. Some 36% of shoppers rely on two review sites, while 41% consult three or more. In addition, social media platforms have become an integral part of the customer research process. Instagram is used as an alternative review platform by 34% of customers and TikTok by 23%. In 2024, you'll have the option to collect and process customer feedback using Telegram Mini-Apps – full-featured web applications inside messenger. Read more about the technology in our article.

In contrast, Google continues to grow its market share by expanding its functionality through Google Business Profile, offering tools such as price comparisons and service-specific highlights. Apple Maps and Trustpilot are the exceptions to the downward trend, with Apple Maps gaining traction following the launch of Apple Business Connect, although consumer adoption remains relatively low.

In business-to-business (B2B) markets, reviews act as social proof, helping companies gain credibility with new customers and partners.

Large companies even turned customers' reviews into a piece of art making them a part of global marketing campaigns. In November 2024, Amazon and Walmart launched similar promotions for Black Friday, asking famous movie stars to read reviews of their products.

For Amazon, user comments were read by Adam Driver to soft classical music and in a theatre setting.

More actors – Ian Somerhalder, Chad Michael Murray, Lisa Rinna, Walton Goggins and Anthony Ramos – were involved in filming for Walmart. The format proved to be more dynamic and geared towards viral social media distribution.

Asking customers for reviews should be based on providing multiple and easy-to-use ways for users to share their feedback. You can use the following tools:

Remember that customers are most likely to leave reviews immediately after a positive experience, so act quickly.

Once collected, it is necessary to respond immediately to both positive and negative feedback, as 88% of consumers prefer brands that take their feedback into account. If you're a startup owner or in the early stages, this process can be done manually. But if you want to scale quickly, we recommend assigning the task to:

Before you start developing the functionality to ask customer review, you need to think about the following conditions:

Typically within an app or website, asking for review might look like the following features.

A simple visual metric that summarises customer sentiment at a glance, often accompanied by the total number of reviews for additional context. But there is an important condition – the number of stars must be high to earn the trust of customers. According to Search Engine Journal research, 59% of consumers expect a business to have between 20 and 99 reviews in order to trust the average star rating.

Despite the simplicity of this solution, it can add value to the promotion of your products. For example, when developing an MVP for an AI-models aggregator OpenOrigin, we included the ability to mark favourite solutions. This allowed users to highlight the most popular models and their developers to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technologies.

This format also drives additional sales. When we developed a loyalty programme app for Beerpoint, a large retail chain, we also included a feature that allowed customers to rate and comment on the snacks and drinks they tried. We also allowed users to create family accounts. This way, anyone can see what their friend or family member likes and buy it for them to try. Or give them as a gift.

Here's another example of how we've calculated the potential increase in sales for a chain of three liquor and beverage stores in Texas, with sales of $3 million and profits of approximately $200,000 per year. Implementing a mobile application-based loyalty programme increased customer retention, purchase frequency and average basket size. Such a solution can increase the company's revenue by 10%-15%, resulting in an additional $100k-$150k in gross margin.

This is a dedicated page or tab where users can view all reviews for a product or service. It typically includes options to sort reviews by factors such as most recent, highest rated, lowest rated or verified purchases. Users might find detailed pros and cons, aggregated ratings, and even company responses in this section.

Reviews or ratings are displayed directly on the product or menu card, often as a star rating or a snippet of a highlighted review. For example, a dish on a restaurant's app might show "4.5 stars – 200 reviews" next to a short testimonial such as "Best pasta in town!". This helps customers make quick decisions while browsing.

Located below a product description or service details, this area allows customers to leave detailed feedback and respond to other users' reviews. For example, a clothing store might include comments on fit and material, with threaded responses to questions such as "Does it run true to size?“

Some companies use unethical tactics to manipulate customers' perceptions. While these techniques may provide short-term benefits, they often result in long-term damage to a company's reputation and can lead to penalties. Let's take a look at two common unethical practices.

Some businesses pay individuals or agencies to write fake reviews to inflate their ratings and improve their online reputation. These paid reviews often lack authenticity and depth, with generic praise or vague feedback and use repetitive or overly promotional language that savvy consumers can easily spot.

Another deceptive tactic is to copy and paste reviews from one platform (e.g. a company's website) to another (e.g. Google or Trustpilot). Businesses may also scrape reviews from external sources to populate their own site. While this may create the illusion of a thriving customer base, it violates the terms and conditions of many platforms and reduces credibility, as repeated reviews look unnatural and disingenuous.

There are several ways how to request a review by implementing such option into the functionality of your product:

The complexity of the solution depends on the stage of product development. For MVPs and start-ups, ratings and reviews of food, products or services are more appropriate. And for large marketplaces and super-applications, you can use combined solutions that give you deep analytics.

Here are some examples of cutting-edging technologies you may implement into your product for requesting reviews.

According to the stats, 88% of consumers would use a business that replies to all of its reviews, compared to just 47% who would use a business that doesn’t respond to reviews at all.

Responding to each review manually can be time consuming and requires a separate moderator. You can automate this process by using generative AI to provide a helpful review response assistant. Simply load your brand information into the AI model and think through prompts with different user scenarios where customers may be happy or unhappy with your services. Notably, trust in AI-generated reviews is quite high, with 58% of consumers preferring them to a review written by a human.

You can also use AI to create summaries of user feedback, highlighting trends in customer behaviour, the most popular items and situations that make them feel negative.

To avoid scams and fake reviews, we prioritise reviews from users who have actually bought the product or service. The technology works as follows. When a user purchases a product or service through our platform, a transaction is created in our system linking the user's account to that purchase. This transaction record includes:

Once all the necessary data has been collected, the system checks whether the user has a matching purchase for the product or service, and timelines to prevent fake reviews from users who haven't bought the item recently. If a match is found, the review is flagged as a 'verified purchase' using metadata in the database.

We've used this technology in the development of Foodclick – a restaurant aggregator app that allows users to share their opinions after visiting different venues and tasting the food. The ability to leave a review and share photos was only available after the purchase had been completed. On the other hand, all users have access to see the restaurant's rating and read other customers' comments.

Reviews can be a tool for gathering feedback on your services, products, overall service quality and individual employee performance. They can help you sharpen your competitive edge, identify weaknesses and identify areas for growth. But for this to happen, the feedback needs to be detailed. That's why you can add some gamification and offer incentives, such as badges or discounts, to encourage participation.

Modern review systems are designed to go beyond text-based feedback and incorporate multimedia elements such as images, videos and emoticons to make reviews more engaging and trustworthy. Technically, this means extending the database structure to store media URLs or binary data alongside textual content.

When a user submits a review, the system processes the uploaded content through a media handling pipeline that includes compression, format conversion and virus scanning to ensure security and performance.

In addition, AI-based moderation tools analyse submitted images and videos for inappropriate content, while machine learning algorithms evaluate emoticons in the context of the sentiment of the review.

A well-designed customer review system is not a "nice-to-have", but a crucial component for building trust and gathering valuable feedback. By staying abreast of industry trends, creating intuitive interfaces, and implementing robust security measures to prevent fraud, businesses can develop a review system that provides real value to customers and drives sales.

Reviews build trust in your brand, which directly influences purchase decisions. Positive comments increase the likelihood of choosing your product. Studies show that 83% of consumers check reviews before making a purchase, and businesses with a rating above 4.0 stars convert customers at a significantly higher rate.

Reviews impact:

Reviews can boost sales by 10-15% by improving reputation, increasing loyalty and attracting new customers. In addition, 88% of users trust brands that respond to reviews, making them more likely to buy.