Why Collect Reviews Directly On Your Website? Use Customer Feedback to Grow Your Business 

Advantages of collecting reviews directly

Let’s start by highlighting a few benefits of collecting reviews directly on your website.

• Increased traffic conversion rate
  According to Podium research, 93% of consumers claim that online reviews impact their purchasing decisions. This proves that product reviews can strongly contribute to driving sales and truly boost credibility. People really trust the customer feedback published online, and posting opinions on your website can successfully encourage newcomers to purchase your product or use your services.
  
  
• SEO
  Google interprets the content of the reviews as the content of your website. This means that reviews can help you to constantly update and diversify your website with new input and keywords, furthermore - for free. Then, Google will reward your site and upgrade its SEO metrics, bringing even more customers.
  
  
• Brand image and transparency
  Publishing reviews positively impact brand image. Providing customers with the opportunity to express their opinions openly helps the company gain trust and credibility and be perceived as more transparent. Also, creating space on the official website allows for filtering and verifying opinions much more efficiently than when placed on external platforms. This lets the brand get more control over the image.
  
  
• Constant improvements
  Last but not least, receiving opinions lets you improve your offer accordingly and make it more appealing and satisfying to your customers. Thanks to first-hand reviews, you will get valuable and accurate information on the quality of your content and identify areas for improvement. By considering your client’s opinions, you will be able to upgrade the quality of your products or services, which will result in more positive reviews and the growth of your brand.
  

The Omnibus directive vs. reviews

The next significant benefit of collecting reviews directly on your website is compliance with the Omnibus directive. What is the Omnibus directive, and what’s the link between the new regulations and customer reviews?

The Omnibus directive is a new approach to protecting customers in the European Union. It applies mainly to B2C e-commerce relations and imposes some transparency-related obligations on e-sellers and online shops. The most important changes are:

• The obligation to publicly inform the prior price in the period of active discount. This will protect customers from fake discounts that frequently happen, especially in high shopping seasons such as Black Friday or Christmas. 
• Strengthening and enforcing the GDPR regulations in the area of sharing personal data in exchange for using digital content and services
• Providing buyers with information on whether the price they see is automatically personalized to their individual user profile or not
• Verifying the reviews. This is one of the most important changes imposed by the Omnibus directive. The new regulations require e-commerce business owners to ensure that the reviews published on their websites were posted by real users. This protects from publishing fake, paid reviews from people who have never used the product. The e-seller should then inform the public what measures they undertake to verify the authenticity of the people behind the reviews.

How to verify online reviews?

So, how to comply with the Omnibus directive regulations and efficiently verify the reviews? Well, it seems quite challenging in the era of spammers, hate speech, and bad bots traffic. However, some solutions come in handy, one of them being Revbee.

Revbee is a modern system for managing clients’ reviews. How does it work exactly? To provide you with an example, one of our clients, the biggest Polish travel agency called Itaka, uses it to collect the opinions of their trip participants. They do it by sending e-mails with requests to write a review. Later on, the input is processed by Revbee, where the moderator on the client’s side reads and verifies opinions.

There are a lot of benefits of using Revbee:

• One of the biggest advantages of Revbee is that it was not designed for any specific industry. It can be easily customized and applied anywhere collecting reviews is required.
• The tool supports the authentication of reviews which boosts the impact of social proof, SEO, traffic, and sales.
• It can be easily integrated with other platforms, such as websites, reservation systems, databases, CRM, e-mail systems, etc. Thanks to this, it is possible to send e-mails fully automatically, schedule them, send reminders and achieve detailed data analysis.
• It is equipped with an intuitive interface for moderators and staff members.
• The reviews can be easily posted from both desktop and mobile.
• The surveys sent to clients can be customized and adjusted to the specifics of the rated product or service with an easy, intuitive editor.
• The tool allows clients to publish photos and rate their experience, contributing to the comment’s authenticity.
• What’s important is the fact that all reviews are moderated doesn’t mean that negative ones are getting removed. Instead, moderators remove only those that are against the service’s policy. This makes the service and its reviews reliable and trustworthy and provides excellent transparency.