(MENAFN- Digital solutions)
Small business owners deal with numerous challenges. How do you get customers to trust you and keep coming back? What’s the best way to spread the word about your services? How do you improve your current products? How do you get quality feedback from customers?
While preparing this review of Trustpilot, we came across multiple explanations for how the site can potentially help small businesses. Is your goal is to find out if Trustpilot is worth your time and energy? Is Trustpilot legit and trustworthy? Can it benefit your business? Read our review below.
Are Trustpilot Reviews Reliable?
Founded in 2007, Trustpilot is an online platform where people can read reviews of companies, products, or services. They can write reviews, and organizations can respond to those reviews.
Some consumers and business owners, though, wonder whether Trustpilot reviews are real. When you read about a local business, are there real customers who are writing those reviews?
According to the accounts we’ve read, if you test Trustpilot in your business for a few weeks, you’ll see that these reviews are very real. You can ask your customers to write reviews for you, and you may soon read reviews from customers you specifically remember.
More importantly, Trustpilot has spent nearly 15 years building the trustworthiness of its open platform. Any customer of a business can write a review of that business, and they can trust they won’t be unfairly censored. They’ll see it published online immediately after submitting it.
But does this leave you open to fraud? Could competitors simply write nasty reviews about your business to discredit you? Trustpilot has several safeguards in place against fraud.
How Trustpilot Protects Against Fraud
Trustpilot’s terms of service specify that only real customers should write reviews of businesses. If anyone is detected writing fake reviews, those reviews can be flagged and removed.
How are fake reviews detected? In several ways:
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Fraud Detection AI: Trustpilot’s engineers have created artificial intelligence software that constantly searches for common patterns of fraud and flags suspicious posts.
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Open Dialogue: As a business owner, you can reply to any review about you. And you can state, for example, that you don’t have a record of them as your customer if the review is fake.
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Flagging Fake Reviews: You or others can flag a review that goes against Trustpilot’s terms of service. If the reviewer is not truly your customer, for example, Trustpilot will request that the reviewer prove (with a receipt or otherwise) that they’re a genuine customer. If they’re not, the review can be removed.
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Fraud Detection Experts: Trustpilot states that they employ experts who monitor possible fraud. They also approach and confront outside vendors who advertise the service of writing fake reviews.
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Community Whistleblowers: Trustpilot enjoys a community of people who seek out fake reviews and flag them to be checked.
In other words, if you use Trustpilot, reviews of your business will be on a platform that employs many safeguards against fraud. Because of their transparency and security, consumers have realized why Trustpilot is reliable, so building up your portfolio of reviews will reflect favorably on your business.
Can Trustpilot Benefit Your Small Business?
Consumers increasingly search for online reviews to help them make purchasing decisions. You can bet that prospects considering your business have searched for third-party reviews about you. That’s because what others say about you is more powerful than what you say about yourself.
With Trustpilot, you can easily centralize your reviews on one platform. You can tell your customers that Trustpilot is where you receive feedback and respond to it. This will reduce the number of reviews that are spread across multiple sites where you (or your potential customers) might never see them.
You can also choose to increase your reviews on Trustpilot. Trustpilot provides an Automatic Feedback Service that will gather reviews for you—and make your customers feel more comfortable interacting with a third party where they can be honest.
Finally, since Trustpilot is a Google Review Partner, your overall Trustpilot rating can appear in Google search results and/or in Google Ads. If you work diligently to raise your star rating, this can show your prospects instantly that you are reliable and appreciated by people like them.
Conclusion and Verdict on Trustpilot
Should you use Trustpilot? That’s an important question for a small business owner. Our research has established that Trustpilot is a legitimate company and Google Review Partner. It uses several safeguards against fraud. And Trustpilot reviews are trusted by consumers.
The conclusion: It makes sense to try out their service for yourself, gather some reviews, and find out if Trustpilot can help raise your revenue. You can sign up for a free business account just to respond to reviews and request more reviews from customers, then upgrade to a paid account later. If you’re interested, visit Trustpilot's business webpage.
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