Insight

How to Get More 5-Star Customer Reviews

Companies with more 5-star reviews earn more customers. Here’s how to get both—and other great benefits.

Customer reviews are one of your most valuable sales and marketing assets. In fact, 98% of consumers read multiple reviews before choosing a business to work with. So if you aren’t getting reviews, you’re missing out on new customers.

If that’s you, that’s okay. We’re going to show you how to get more 5-star customer reviews, so you can stand out from competitors and win more business.

Why do 5-star reviews matter?

Online reviews are crucial. They affect Google search rankings and who customers choose to work with. But 5-star reviews, the highest rating given, have even larger effects, like:

How high you rank in Google searches
How many customers choose you over competitors
How much people are willing to pay and average transaction value
How many awards and recognitions you get
How many “Best of” and “Top Providers” lists you get included in

This is important to understand: more 5-star reviews leads to more customers, higher transaction value, and lower customer acquisition costs.

That’s the business trifecta! And we’re showing you how to get it.

View our Ultimate Guide to Online Reviews for more details and sources on why reviews matter.

3 Steps to Earn Tons of 5-Star Customer Reviews

1. Create incredible customer experiences.

In order to get 5-star reviews—the highest ratings—you have to delight customers. For most businesses, delighting customers takes three things.

Great product or service.

It’s got to work great. It’s got to be easy to use. It’s got to leave the customer in a better place than before they met you. This is true whether you work in retail, healthcare, home repair, legal or accounting—anywhere.

Great relationships.

Customers leave raving reviews for people they care about, not necessarily brands. If you want 5-star reviews, your front-line workers need to be building quality relationships with customers. You’ve got to be likable, knowledgeable, and helpful throughout your customer interactions.

Great logistics and operations.

You may have a great product and great people, but how easy is it for customers to work with you? Do you show up on time and get the job? Are communications clear and consistent? If not, you might get a positive review, but it won’t be 5-stars.

Once you create these incredible customer experiences, it’s pretty easy to get those reviews.

2. Ask for the review! Then ask again.

Customers are kind of like teenagers—you have to ask them, or they won’t do it. Here’s how to ask, so they’ll leave you those reviews you need.

Pick a platform.

There are plenty of online review websites, but you don’t need to worry about getting reviews on all of them, especially if you’re new to the review generation game. What you should do instead is to pick the one platform where potential customers are most likely to find you.

Popular review websites include:

Google—for those with a local presence
Facebook—for anyone
Amazon—for retail brands and publishers
Angi—for contractors and other home service providers
G2—for software companies
TripAdvisor—for travel and hospitality

For reference, Text Request connects directly to Google and Facebook.

Getting more reviews anywhere relevant is going to help you in search results and in winning new customers, but you want to maximize your efforts. So pick the one where customers are most likely to find you. If you aren’t sure, focus on where competitors spend their efforts.

Create templates.

Texting will be the most effective way to request and earn these reviews. 70% of people across all adult age groups and other demographics say texting is the fastest way to reach them, and text messaging earns the highest engagement of any communication channel.

Whether you text for reviews or go through another channel, be sure to create message templates that anyone on your team can use to request reviews. This keeps communications consistent while helping you achieve your goals.

View our SMS Review Request Templates here.

Enable your team.

You’ve got to communicate clearly to your team why reviews matter, what process you’ll use to get them (more on that next), and what they’ll get for earning more.

Our Reviews leaderboard shows how many reviews each employee has earned in a given period, and how that compares to the rest. You and the whole team can see it, and even make a competition out of it. Perhaps whoever earns the most reviews each month gets a reward?

There are plenty of ideas to play with here, but be intentional to get your whole team moving as a unit. Make it easy and enjoyable for them to gather reviews, and your whole business will thrive.

Bake it into your communications and operations.

For anything to work, you’ve got to have a plan and a process. Make sure you and your team know:

Why reviews matter
When to ask for reviews
How to ask for reviews (what to say)
Your primary metric to track
What they’ll get in return

Use templates, automated workflows, sticky note checklists, or whatever it takes to incorporate review requests into your day-to-day communications and operations.

Encourage private feedback.

No matter how great you are, you will make some mistakes, or some customers will just be unpleasant. That’s life. For these customers—or anyone, really—you can encourage private feedback. This way, issues are voiced, but you get the chance to handle them internally instead of it going public.

You can use our Reviews feature to take advantage of this. You may even send a request for only private to customers who you aren’t sure had good experiences.

3. Respond to every review.

Earning more 5-star customer reviews is helpful for Google search results, winning new business, and being considered a top provider. But it’s also crucial that you respond to these reviews.

Why?

Because consumers vetting your reviews are also looking to see how good you are to work with. Your responsiveness, and how you handle both positive and negative feedback, are indicators of that.

In general:

Respond quickly
Thank people for taking the time to leave a review
Apologize for any negative experiences
Compensate customers for any bad experiences
Gently correct any misinformation

Taking time to respond speaks volumes to the consumers who are considering using you, plus contributes to a positive online reputation.

Use Review Management for Best Results

“Review Management” is a fancy term for intentionally requesting, responding to, and tracking online reviews across one or more platforms. Our Reviews feature does exactly that for you, connecting your Google and Facebook business pages to Text Request so your team can text customers for reviews, and manage everything in one place.

Check out our Reviews feature, get a demo of it, or talk to us about it. It may not feel necessary when you first start asking for reviews, but it will quickly become a core piece of your success.