Maintain a high Trustpilot rating: 5 tips you must implement

5 tactics to maintain an outstanding Trustpilot rating

Trustpilot remains one of the most commonly used review platforms out there – rivaled only by Yelp and Google Business. An estimated million reviews on businesses in 23 countries worldwide are posted there every month.

So, it’s no wonder why your potential customers are likely to check out your rating there before making up their minds. And, it’s a no-brainer that you need to keep a high Trustpilot rating, or it’ll be tough to get new customers.

Understand how your Trustpilot rating is calculated

Before figuring out how to keep your Trustpilot rating high, let’s first dive into how Trustpilot calculates your overall score.

You might think it’s a simple as dividing the sum of all ratings by the number of comments, but not exactly. Trustpilot takes into account the following three factors in their calculations:

• Timeliness. The older reviews become, the less weight they carry in your overall rating.
• Frequency. As the time span is important, you’ll need to encourage a stable influx of new comments to keep the score stable.
• Bayesian average. All business accounts automatically get 7 reviews with a 3.5 rating added to the general pool of comments. It’s done to ensure every new business with few reviews has a balanced score. But the more feedback you get, the less impactful these 7 reviews become.

Make sure you comply with Trustpilot’s policies

As for the inner workings of the platform, there are also two more things that affect your Trustpilot rating.

First, Trustpilot has fraud detection software at its service to automatically delete untrustworthy – i.e. fake – reviews.

Second, this website also has strict policies on inviting customers to leave feedback:

• They shouldn’t be rewarded for this with gift cards, discounts, loyalty points, or any other incentives;
• The language used should be neutral: i.e., you shouldn’t encourage the person to leave positive feedback specifically;
• You should invite either all or every second/third/fourth customer to be impartial. In other words, don’t intentionally skip over people who may leave negative feedback.

Ask and you shall receive

This step – asking for feedback – should be included in the customer journey. But when you go and say, “Hello there, could you rate us on Trustpilot?” can make it or break it.

Here are two pieces of advice:

• Identify when customer engagement is at its highest. It’s usually right after they got the product or service from you. You can also ask for reviews in person if you’re not an online-only business.
• Remind them a week or two down the road. Some customers aren’t ready to give feedback on the product they’ve just received – they want to try it in action first. So, don’t hesitate to reach out to them later on with a link to the Trustpilot’s page.

Give enough thought to how you ask, too

The way you ask also matters – perhaps even more than the timing itself. Here are 3 tips to help you do it right:

• Make it easy. You can try by giving them a prompt, such as: “Let us know how your visit to our shop today went”, or try with QR codes on flyers or packaging. Another way is to include the links directly to the review form to minimize the number of clicks.
• Emphasize the action’s value. Explain that feedback won’t benefit just you. It’ll help other people make an informed decision, too.
• Let them know how long it’ll take. This will show that you appreciate their time – and that it’s easy and quick to leave feedback.

Respond to negative reviews

First of all, don’t take them personally. Yes, getting negative feedback with a one-star rating isn’t pleasant. But responding just to explain why the customer is wrong about how they feel is going to damage your reputation even more.

Instead, to deal with negative reviews professionally, take time to do some damage control and understand how to improve your product/service later on. What’s more, if you solve the issue, the customer can turn a negative comment into a positive one.

Heres how to deal with negative reviews:

• Be personal in your approach. Don’t copy and paste the same message – that’ll come off as insincere or uncaring.
• Be transparent, too. If there was a mistake on your part, acknowledge it.
• Invite them to further dialogue. You might need some details from the person to resolve their issues, like contact information or personal data. In this case, ask them to write to your business email address;
• Offer compensation. It can be a gift card, a discount, bonus points, or anything else. But it’s just a bonus – solve the main issue, too.
• Change your policies. If they caused an issue, update them. Then, let the reviewer (and other readers) know that you took this feedback seriously enough to do that.

Conclusion

This should go without saying, but your product’s quality is the main ingredient that can maintain an outstanding Trustpilot rating. To get positive feedback, customers’ experience with your product or service has to warrant it. Otherwise, you can be sure of just one thing: no matter how hard you try, you’ll get plenty of bad reviews that will spoil your reputation.

On the other hand, no one – and nothing – is perfect. No matter how detail-oriented you were in creating the product or service, along with the customer journey, there will be some incidents. What matters is how you handle those situations – and how you use what you learn in the process.