Testimonials help you support, and in some cases accomplish, almost every strategy your company undertakes. They help you identify what’s important to your customer, provide feedback that your standards are working correctly, counter the occasional unrealistic client, and help you determine and increase your market value.
The goal is to approach testimonials with the same forethought and consideration you gave your product or service. If the goal is one or more of the reasons above, then framing how and when you collect testimonials is important.
Immediate after delivery is a perfect time to ask for a glowing testimonial. The client still has that longing for a perfect solution in their head, and assumes your solution will, in fact, be perfect.
Real testimonials, road-worn client perspective, only comes with time. Are you happy right after you purchased a car? Probably. However, you’re probably more happy with yourself, having “stuck it” to the suckers at the dealership. Is the car any good? Were the promises made by the sales staff for real? You couldn’t possibly know the answers to these questions until you get the automobile home and try it out for quite a while.
Testimonials prove a point, they justify an action, but can easily be taken out of context. Some companies present testimonials taken from friends and partners as the common perception of their firm. Always be leery of testimonials used in this fashion. Testimonials solicited by you for internal purposes can be more powerful. They can clue you in on exactly where you are having problems. They can also allow you to see your biggest successes.
So how should you go about collecting real testimonials? By doing it over and over. As you gather feedback from your customers, also collect a testimonial. If your product or service provides real value, it will continue to provide that value over time.
Testimonials from different ends of the spectrum can help as well. Positive endorsements may work well for initial marketing, but being able to claim that even customers that ended up not choosing you, or choosing you, but having an unsuccessful experience, can still see the positive attributes of your firm. This level of insight only comes from staying in constant contact with your clients – successful and otherwise – allowing them a voice into your process and input into your improvements.
As you may already suspect is that testimonials can best be used to keep an open conversation, a dialogue, with your clients. An endorsement is step one. Collecting additional information to better your business is step two. Continuing the circle is step three.
Testimonials also serve as congratulations when certain employees do a good job, or go above and beyond. They push to reinforce service policies. And, of course, assist with sales and marketing efforts.