Genuine testimonials and recommendations from clients and customers are essential to giving your business credibility, particularly when prospects first come across your business on the internet.

There are now a number of ways of getting testimonials from customers via independent websites such as Feefo that can then be displayed on your website. These will display negative as well as positive feedback, but give you the chance to respond too. This makes it clear that the feedback is genuine, and in some cases you can make a negative a positive. It also gives you important customer feedback which you can use to improve customer service and your products or service.

Research shows that prospects view some negative feedback as a positive – if this is the worse your clients have experienced, that may be fine with them, or the issue raised may not be relevant to them. These types of testimonial services only allow genuine customers to comment, as they contact your customers by email after purchase using your business data. This is different from online review sites such as Trip Advisor where anybody can add reviews, and there is the possibility that others with a different agenda may comment on your business!

For those in a Business to Business market, where an individual is likely to be recommended, Linked-in recommendations are excellent as you cannot write them yourself – only chose whether or not to display them so they have to be genuine.

Here is a leaflet we recently produced for a school using quotes from the students themselves.