How do people choose who to do business with?
People do business with other people. And when you are trying to choose a product or service you’ll ask for recommendations, or read reviews. There have been plenty of studies on how people use reviews, but you probably don’t need to look much further than your own spending patterns. Before you make a purchase decision you’re likely to ask a friend, relative or colleague for a recommendation or check out other people’s reviews online.
What has Blacknight been doing with reviews?
We’ve been publishing testimonials and reviews of our services for years. We chose them and we published them on our own website, so we were acting as the gatekeeper. That’s far from optimal. Sure, we’ve always asked people to be honest when providing a review or testimonial, but it would be really easy for us to selectively publish positive reviews of our service. We could choose only those comments and reviews that happy clients provided. We’d look like we were absolutely wonderful and infallible. It’d be great.
Or would it be?
Would you really trust us if we only told you nice things about our services?
Since we started the company well over a decade ago one of the things we’ve always tried to do is be honest. We try to be honest to both our clients and ourselves.
Trust is earned. It’s not an automatic right.
What is Blacknight changing?
We’ve engaged with Trust Pilot. They’re a 3rd party service that collects reviews for thousands of businesses around the world. The platform is very transparent and we as a business cannot block or remove negative reviews. What you get, therefore, is honest reviews of companies’ products and services.
I’m confident in our services. I’d have to be! However I’m also well aware that stuff breaks, bad communication can happen and not everybody will have a happy experience with us. It’d be great if they did, but in the “real world” things can and will go wrong from time to time. In reality it’s how a business handles issues that makes all the difference.
If you’re an existing Blacknight customer you can review us on Trust Pilot today. We will be sending invitations to all our existing clients in the coming weeks asking you to provide an honest review of your experiences with us. We will also be automatically inviting new clients to review their experiences with us, so if you get an email from Trust Pilot it’s legit!
So far we don’t have that many reviews, but we’re only getting started with this new review system, so that’s to be expected.
We plan on incorporating these genuine reviews from you, our clients, on our site and to use them as part of our overall marketing strategy.
Personally I think that honest reviews like these are a better way of building trust in our services than simply telling people that they should buy our services.
So if you are an existing client of ours please do take the time to submit an honest review – warts and all it’ll be welcome!
