To Review or not to Review, that is the question

Back in the early part of 2016, we had a decision to make - should we sign up to the Trustpilot platform and encourage our customers to leave reviews about their experience with Connevans? Reviews could be posted about our service, the products, prices, delivery and simply any and every kind of interaction someone had with Connevans.

Ok, we were quite confident, people had always said very nice things about us, we work hard to deliver great service and very good and reliable tried & tested products. Many people had often told us how pleased they were with Connevans, a regular sentiment was 'We wish we had found you sooner', but were we brave enough to put our customers comments out there for all to see?

To have Trustpilot integrated into our website would cost us money. To join the Trustpilot platform would incur a high regular subscription, so should we do it?

After some deliberation, we started in May of 2016 and we kept our fingers firmly crossed, hoping we would get some reviews and even more importantly, that they were nice :-)

Well of course, we know now that we shouldn't have worried, within a few weeks we had received more than 100 reviews and they were pretty much all lovely, yes we were delighted.

Since then, our review rating has stayed consistently between 4.8/4.9 out of 5 - we've had more lovely comments than we dared to hope for and some entertaining ones too. Probably the most memorable was the nice fella who gave us 1 star because he thought our breakfast charge at £20 was too high - quite frankly we agreed with him. It transpired he was confusing us with a hotel had had stayed at recently.

Photo by Eiliv-Sonas Aceron / Unsplash
In this kind of situation, Trustpilot were very good, they contacted the reviewer and removed the review. But, they are fiercely protective of the reputation of their brand and will only remove a review if there has been a genuine & obvious mistake, you cannot ask for a review to be removed simply because you don't like it.

We've also found it very interesting. Some people will never leave a 5 star review, no matter how highly they think of us and what enthusiastic words they write, they simply believe there is always room for improvement, fair enough.

Some people will write very detailed long descriptions
others will write just a couple of words, either way we are very grateful

We try to reply to every review, we feel that if our customers are kind enough to spend some time reviewing us, it is simply courteous to say Thank You!

On very rare occasions, we get reviews with less than 4 or 5 stars, these are also valueable as they give us an opportunity to see why the occasional customer isn't totally satisfied and we try hard to explain and make sure it doesn't happen again. Sometimes people give us 1 star but the words they leave are very complimentary - strange but true !!

So knowing what we know now, would we do it all over again? Yes, we cetainly would. We know search engines like genuine reviews, they also like replies as well! Our customers can do research and see what others think before they place their order with us, our staff are delighted when mentioned by name and it all adds to the feel good factor within Connevans to know that we are appreciated. It also keeps us on our toes, we've set the bar high and we aim to keep it there!

Photo by Frans Vledder / Unsplash
Now, 6 years later, we are fast approaching 4,000 reviews and to say we are delighted is an understatement!

So on behalf of all of us at Connevans, thank you to everyone who has left us a review and for your very kind & helpful comments.

Photo by Courtney Hedger / Unsplash