How to collect and showcase customer testimonials
Introduction
Collection and display of customer testimonials are important for all businesses, especially people who want to establish their personal brands. A testimonial is the strongest endorsement one can get to prove to future business partners that you’re an incredible person to work with. Also, testimonials from your best customers can help you understand the exact problems you solved for them and the impact of your work too.
In this article, we will now look at how to collect and showcase testimonials on your website.
Problem
The proof of my work and the feedback from my clients is scattered over a number of platforms: freelance platforms, LinkedIn, Twitter, Emails, etc. It’s tedious to consolidate all these reviews and host them in one place. Besides, not everything is a ‘testimonial’. Some of these are descriptions of what it was like for my clients to work with me, some describe the problem and the impact of my work, some are simple acknowledgments of my contributions. Essentially, they are not consistent in structure and it’s hard for anybody new to understand my overall contribution to a project.
Solution
I came across a tool called Testimonial (affiliate link — you receive 15% off your paid plan) on Twitter when I noticed the founder’s tweets. Damon Cheng has been doing a fantastic job of building this tool in public, sharing updates, and acting on customer feedback in a timely manner.
I decided to first give it a try for one of my clients who was carrying out a tedious process of manually collecting video testimonials from customers.
The current process was something like this:
- Somebody from the customer care team sends an email to the customer to ask for a video testimonial.
- If the customer is keen, they record the video on their phone or laptop. A few customers drop off right here because it is very informal and without a structure of what they would talk about.
- If the customer has recorded a video, they have been asked to email back the video with their order number, name, etc. mentioned somewhere in the email body and subject. Alternatively, they were asked to send these videos over WhatsApp while identifying who they are. If you’re a customer-centric business, this ask from customers is clearly not customer-centric and you can do better!
- Once the video is received, the customer care team would store the videos in a shared location.
- The website team will pick and publish these videos one at a time.
This entire process was being repeated for every customer.
Any guesses how many video testimonials did the brand receive?
ZERO!
It should not come as a surprise.
As a solution to this tedious problem, I created a Testimonial page for the brand with some inputs from Damon. I also asked for a few tweaks to the software and Damon obliged. The page was up and running within an hour and the experience was super smooth.
Seeing how beautiful the final solution was, I finally decided to create a Testimonial account for myself.
For the rest of this article, I will use examples of my own Testimonial page.
Things I love about Testimonial
- It provides a landing page that I can send to my clients.
- Clients can use prompts that I can define to record or write a testimonial.
- Clients can record a video or write a testimonial.
- If neither, it allows me to optionally ask clients to leave reviews on a different platform like Google My Business, G2, Facebook, Capterra, Yelp, etc. I used GMB.
- I can also add compliments from other platforms to the list of testimonials.
- It provides me with a page where all my testimonials are listed in one place.
How to collect customer testimonials
I simply send my clients a link to the collect video testimonial page. To keep it easy, I ask my clients to submit text-based testimonials, and only send video testimonials if they’re comfortable! To date, it has had a 100% completion rate, and I absolutely love reading what my clients write about their experience working with me. Optionally, you can embed this page on your website and send a link to this page to your clients or customers.
How to showcase customer testimonials
The public page that Testimonial provides serves me well, but I can also embed it on a website.
The landing page of Testimonial provides a number of examples of how the testimonials can be presented in a variety of ways.
Conclusion
Collecting and showcasing testimonials on your website is likely to boost your online presence, customer trust, and sales. For me, it also serves as a nice way to reminisce about my project experience with the client.
And Testimonial is doing a fantastic job at making it easy for me.
My portfolio website: amitsarda.xyz
