From hotels and restaurants to books and movies, customer reviews play a crucial role. Customer reviews of products or services can significantly affect businesses. When a customer writes a review about a product or service, they are sharing their experience - whether good or bad and helping businesses reform and improve themselves. 

Customer reviews also play a key role in influencing consumer decisions. After reading reviews of customers, many consumers may choose to purchase from a business or drop the items in their cart. That’s why it is necessary to draft customer reviews with meaningful information to help understand others' experiences clearly and whether or not to try out the same.

How to write a great customer review?

Writing a good review improves the chances of it getting published which can help other people gain insight into your experience and help them to make their decision.  If you are wondering how to write a review, just these 8 simple steps:

Do not make the review too long or too short 

Regardless of whether you liked or disliked something, your words matter to the business and other customers. That’s why it’s important to write a concise and thorough review. Writing short reviews like “good food” or “terrible service “is not good enough to provide a detailed layout of the experience you had. On the contrary, lengthy reviews can often go ignored or seem incoherent. A 100-150 word length is ideal for customer reviews to cover all crucial pieces of information. 

Try to include as many details as possible 

Include all the things that you think are important which can include information like the nature of business, and performance. satisfaction, delivery, cost, service, quality, and a lot more. Break down the review into multiple points to make other people understand it with great ease and use it to their advantage. You don’t have to write a review entirely positive or negative. If the overall review is positive but some aspects can be improved upon, you should add all important points.

Do not make spelling & grammar mistakes 

You need to make sure that the content part is precise, well-written, and error-free to establish a meaningful sense for other consumers. Making mistakes in grammar and spelling can significantly lead to a negative impact on the reader’s mind. You can take the help of various online tools to rectify grammar mistakes before posting reviews.

Maintain a formal tone in the customer reviews so it is well understood by a wider segment of the audience. Avoid using difficult synonyms, abbreviations, or slang which can lead to confusion. 

Try to leave a review soon after interacting with the business 

It is important to let your audience know about your experience. The best practice is to leave a review immediately instead of a delaying this process. Over 65% of the customers believe that reviews more than 3 months old, are not relevant. 

People must know if your experience was recent or if it is something that isn’t relevant anymore. It reflects on the current nature of the product or service they are interested in, so customers prefer reading recent reviews. If you had reviewed a certain business or any other entity a long time ago, it might be possible that they have acknowledged your feedback and improved customer experience. If your review was posted a few months or years back, it is a possibility that people might have different experiences with the same business now. 

Write an honest review 

It is important to be truthful about your experience in your reviews. Other people rely on you for such crucial information and if you are not completely honest in your customer reviews, you are affecting the judgment of several others. Don’t make any reviews based on personal feelings or for incentives and try to be transparent and true with the information you provide. If you have something negative to say about your experience, do so

Try to share a review with specific insights 

Based on the nature of your experience, try to include some advice for other people who are looking forward to something similar. For instance, if you are planning to invest in a real estate making an informed decision is necessary so that you don't end up burning your pocket. In such case you might want to go through the reviews and learn from previous investors experiences. This can be helpful for others to make an informed decision.

Avoid non-relevant details 

Even if you are writing a positive review about something to great lengths, you must avoid any irrelevant details. For example, it's alright to share the employee or concerned person’s name but it's not ideal to share their personal contact information to which you might have gained access through your interaction. Adding such details can be troublesome in many aspects and violates another person’s privacy.

Use a calm and friendly tone 

Your tone should not be affected by the nature of your experience. It doesn’t matter whether you had a good or bad experience, you need to write a review in a composed, civil and calm manner without any inappropriate language. You should also not make any defamatory statements in your reviews. In case you had a bad experience, explain your entire experience in a calm and assertive tone to help the business improve. As it will be read by other consumers for guidance, your review should appear helpful to other readers as well. 

Conclusion

Positive reviews can lead customer engagement to great heights but negative reviews can make it fall to great depth. Writing reviews about one’s experience can greatly influence the decision of potential customers which is why it needs to be done while keeping in mind certain aspects to provide a meaningful piece of information.  When answering the question of how to write a review, the key aspects that should be considered are length, content, context, relativity, accuracy, and honesty.  With an honest review, you can engage with the right set of audiences in no time. 

You can also reach out to Freshreview if you need any assistance in review writing and establishing your review presence over popular review sites.