How to collect testimonials

It’s great to analyze your ratings on regular basis, identify your strengths, and pinpoint your weaknesses. You can get a decent view of what your company does well and what should be improved. When it comes to bad ratings the solution is pretty obvious. You fix the problems based on the feedback from your customers.

But what about positive feedback? There’s probably nothing to fix there. So, should you just be happy and do nothing? Well, not exactly.

Net Promoter Score is a metric that allows you to follow up with customers who are willing to share their thoughts about your company and instantly respond to their concerns or issues. You ask your customer how likely are they to recommend your company to a friend or colleague. NPS measures the loyalty that exists between your company and your customers. When you get negative feedback you use it to improve. But when you get a positive one you have just identified a promoter of your brand.

These people are enthusiastic about your product/service and represent a great opportunity for collecting customer testimonials!

When your buyers pick a 9 or 10 on the NPS survey, they are 5 times more likely to refer your company to their friends and write positive reviews about your products and company.

There’s a significant chance that your clients just haven’t thought about writing a review for your business yet. Not everyone thinks “I love this product, let me write a review about it!” More often than not they need a nudge. That’s exactly why you should send out NPS surveys to your customers on a regular basis and follow up with your Promoters in order to collect testimonials afterward.

There will always be a group of customers that won’t respond. A powerful way to change this is to offer incentives when you send your ask for testimonial messages. A great way to do this is by offering coupons for popular websites, such as Amazon. Important thing is to state that you expect them to write an honest review or testimonial, not necessarily a positive one. The incentive should also in no way be connected to the positive character of the review.

How to get testimonials from clients?

Let’s see how to do it in practice. For this example, we’re going to use Nicereply surveys with LiveAgent integration. There are two ways to collect testimonials via NPS with Nicereply. First, we are going to explain how to get testimonials from clients with NPS campaigns.

Get testimonials from customers with a “Campaign” distribution

Start with creating your Nicereply account and follow-up with LiveAgent integration. After that, you are ready to send your first NPS campaign to your customers. You go to the NPS tab in your account and click on “Campaigns” distribution.

Now, you name your contact list and import your LiveAgent customer contacts (either paste them or upload a file). Afterward, you can edit the appearance of the campaign to match your brand.

Then you go to campaign settings where you can edit subject or sender name, and schedule your campaign.

Your NPS campaign is now scheduled and will be sent to your contact list at the specified date and time. You can see all the collected ratings and comments on your Nicereply Dashboard.

Look at that! Your customers responded to the NPS survey and gave you positive feedback. As you can see, there is a little blue envelope icon next to the customer’s name. This icon allows you to respond to a rating with one click.

After you click on the envelope, a new email will be created within your default email client. This email will already have the recipient email defined.

All you need to do is create a message that will motivate your customers to write a testimonial for your company. For example, you could ask for a review of your company on a popular software comparison websites such as; G2Crowd, Capterra, or GetApp. Or perhaps, ask your customers to write a testimonial for your website directly.

Testimonial campaign template (example):

Another great way to reach out to your clients is to use a testimonial request template to write them an email.

Get testimonials from clients with a “Trigger” distribution

However, there is another way to collect user testimonials that also allows you to automate sending out the follow-up messages. You create your Nicereply account, create integration with LiveAgent, then go to the NPS tab in your account, and click on “Trigger” distribution. A trigger is an automated email that sends a survey to a customer after his/her ticket is resolved.

Select LiveAgent integration from the dropdown menu to manage trigger behavior in trigger settings. You can change email sender and subject, edit the number of hours after which the survey will be sent, and more. You need to save your changes and activate the trigger before proceeding.

After NPS trigger activation Nicereply will start scanning the status of your tickets on a regular basis and will send NPS surveys (set) hours after tickets are resolved. After you collect feedback from customers you will be able to see it directly within the rated ticket.

Nicereply automatically adds a new ticket tag and comment specifying rating value and comment.

Now all you need to do is create a new Rule within your LiveAgent account so that follow-up emails will be automatically sent to promoters of your brand. In your LiveAgent account go to Configuration and click on Automation – Rules – Create. You come up with a name for your new rule and define its conditions. For this example, we are going to name the rule Nicereply NPS testimonial. Our new rule will be applied when ticket tags change and the condition group is ticket tag; Nicereply NPS 10 added. If you want you can add another condition group for NPS 9 ticket tag.

The last thing we need to do is create an action. Choose to send email as an action to be performed. Then you can change the sender email and who the email will be sent to (choose Requester). We will use the same subject and email content as in the first example. When you’re done creating your email simply save your new rule and you will be ready to start collecting user testimonials!

Wrap-up

Testimonials are a powerful way to explain the value your company brings to existing customers in the purest and “believable” manner. Your customers were once hesitant about purchasing your products or services and therefore can provide great help for those who are in this situation now. Once the potential new buyer hears from someone they can actually relate to – and someone whose job isn’t to praise your company – then they are more likely to make a purchase.

People are much more likely to believe the value you say you provide if there is proof offered by businesses facing issues similar to theirs. User testimonials are so powerful because of the fact that they enable customers to be in the spotlight instead of your company. In fact, consumers are 58% more likely to convert when they’ve interacted with a review, so start collecting them ASAP!

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