How can businesses curb fake reviews4 min read

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.