The importance of displaying real-time feedback and testimonial page examples
In today’s Internet driven environment, there is nothing more important than social proof. Before you buy anything, you would be foolish not to check what other people think of the service they are about to buy. I’d be very surprised if you booked a holiday without looking at Tripadvisor.
In the B2B services environment, so few businesses actively seek testimonials and case studies from customers. Why? Because it’s traditionally quite hard work. It’s seen as a difficult thing to ask a customer. What if they say no? Will I damage the relationship? Will they get annoyed for asking?
Customer Thermometer changes that. We provide the mechanism to get plenty of real time feedback and testimonials
If you’re interested in giving your customers a real time view of what your own customers are thinking, then follow our 5 step testimonial page examples process below.
The Customer Thermometer 5-step guide to creating the perfect real-time feedback and testimonials page
- Start using Customer Thermometer to get feedback and ratings
- Create a Testimonials page on your website using our testimonial page examples
- Publish a live feedback widget
- Add selected testimonials as part of the design
- Keep it up-to-date!
Step 1 – start collecting feedback and ratings
If you’re looking for lots of feedback, both quantitative and qualitative, then I guess it goes without saying, we’d recommend using Customer Thermometer!
You could of course use different tools. When choosing your feedback tool – bear this in mind… If you ask a recipient to go to a lot of effort in providing feedback and use these techniques… you may not receive much feedback!
- “click here for a short 10 question survey”
- “leave us feedback and go into a draw for a $50 Amazon Voucher”
- “email us with your thoughts”…
Instead, by using the 1-click, light-touch approach, recipients are MUCH more likely to respond. Then, if you choose to prompt for a comment, they are MUCH more likely to write a few words as they’ve already emotionally committed to leaving feedback.
We do get about an 80% response rate. And the really cool thing is that, out of that 80%, we probably get about two-thirds that actually leave us a comment.
Richard Raue, President, Hitech
Step 2 – create a testimonials page
If you haven’t already got a page on your website that’s specifically dedicated to testimonials and feedback, then this is the first place to start. Get in touch with your web team – create a new page purely for feedback and get it ready for lots of publishing!
Why not take a look at our own Customer Thermometer testimonials page for some ideas?
Step 3 – publish a live feedback widget
Initial setup – real-time feedback widgets
The first thing you will need to do to set up your brand new, real-time feedback page is to log in to your Customer Thermometer account. From there, click on ‘Reporting’ to go to your reporting dashboard. Next, click the widgets tab. This may be an area you’ve never looked at before. As you scroll down the page you’ll notice a number of different widgets we provide which enable you to publish different types of data from your Customer Thermometer account to your own website or perhaps your Facebook page.
Note that the widget tab at the main ‘Reporting’ level will always display results at an overall Account level. For Blast specific widgets – head into a specific Blast breakdown and use the widgets available within there.
You may want to take a moment to have a look at some of the other possibilities and options for publishing real-time feedback data from your account. Scroll right down down to the real-time comments widget.
To see what this looks like, take a look at the screenshot below.
The code showing on the right-hand side next to the example widget is called an iframe and if you’ve ever embedded a YouTube video inside your website or your Facebook page you will find this code familiar.
An iframe is simply an invisible window which pulls through data from somewhere else and displays it on your website.
Embedding the code
This is simple. Click on the iframe code area … notice that the code is selected… press CTRL-C or Apple C on your keyboard to copy the code into your clipboard.
Next, head over to the area of the website you would like to display this data. Ideally this would be your newly created Happy Customers page – but you really could add it anywhere.
If you’re using WordPress, you might want to paste the data into a widget area in a sidebar, or you might paste into a post or a page or even your homepage. Once in this area, simply press CTRL-V or Apple V to paste the code into the relevant area of your website. This may be a good time to suggest you set this up on a private page, which nobody else can see until you’re happy with the final results.
If you are setting up a dedicated real time feedback and testimonials page, now is the time for some customisation … put some description at the top and then paste the widget, so that your potential customers and prospects have some context around what they looking at:
When you hit publish or save, take a look at the webpage you just created, you will then see a live stream of all recent comments which have been generated using your Customer Thermometer account. Note, at the moment, it may not look exactly as you want it to look. We will come back to tweak the settings in a few moments.
As you look at the widget, you will also realize that comments, regardless of whether they’re good, bad or indifferent are now being published to your website.
It is possible to moderate those comments…
Being transparent with real-time feedback
Publishing a real-time feed of your results and comments, some may say is a dangerous thing, however we believe it’s all about being transparent. It’s important that you are able to show that sometimes things do go wrong and it’s also important to show evidence that most of the time, you get things right and your customers are happy hence the reason they’re leaving favorable comments.
There will be occasions however where people leave comments which you do not want exposed to the outside world… comments which contain profanities … comments which are maybe unfair or unjust and comments which contain personal details. In those situations we give you the opportunity to moderate those comments before they actually go live.
How to moderate your comments
To enable moderation, go into your Customer Thermometer account once again and click on ‘settings’.
You’ll then notice 3 options. You can switch off moderation, publish all comments by default OR hide all comments by default, until you actively publish them. All of our customers have different requirements.
If you then take a look around your account and click on a recent comment that has been left, you’ll notice a toggle button in the small pop-up. This toggle button enables you to moderate each comment as it comes in.
You’ll also notice that all comments can easily be moderated from the ‘Comments’ tab:
If you next take a look at your account dashboard, you will notice that all comments which are published to your website via the widget are showing in the dashboard area at the bottom. As a test, flick the toggle switch on a recent comment to ‘off’. Return to your dashboard and you will see that that comment has disappeared from the dashboard. This also means it has disappeared from the public widget as well, and so it’s a good place to check what’s being exposed – by looking at your dashboard.
Customizing the widget
The final piece of the jigsaw, is to adjust the look of the real time widget you’ve just pasted into your website. iframes can be customized to certain dimensions as you can see below. You can also change the number of recent comments which have been left.
So, if you have many hundreds of comments being left on on a weekly basis, you may want to have a longer webpage to display more of them. If you have only a small number of comments left on a weekly basis you can change this number to reflect this as well.
The iframe below is live – feel free to embed it to try it out. You can see how to customize it below.
iframe src="https://app.customerthermometer.com/?template=embed_chart&c=last_x_comments&w=600&h=400&u=52&m=d3719961&i=&x=5&lb=Latest%20CT%20Comments&cl=333" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="600" height="400"
Choose the number of recent comments you’d like to display by changing the parameter, x – shown in green below.
You can change the title displayed by changing the words in blue. Note %20 is the equivalent to a space.
You can change the size – by changing both width and height parameters within the code as shown below in red. Make sure both the widths are the same, as well both the heights.
You can also change the text color. This is an HTML color code. You can look them up here.
Step 4 – add additional testimonials
Enhance the page you’ve created with key testimonials… pull them from your feed and publish them around the page, perhaps bringing in a company logo / image of the person leaving it (with their permission of course). See more of our own testimonial page examples below to help you create yours.
Or, do what we do… if we spot a great testimonial, call them up and ask for an interview! The worst that they can say is no.
Step 5 – keep it up to date
Your real time testimonials page is one of the most important assets any business can have.
Make it part of your morning or weekly routine to moderate and publish comments. Keep it live – keep it current. If a visitor sees the most recent testimonial from a year ago – that’s actually worse than not having a testimonials page at all.
Looking for inspiration? Take a look at one of our real estate customer’s testimonials page, here.
If this has got you thinking about other widgets you may wish to publish to your website click here to take you to our user guide showing all of our widgets.
In the meantime we hope you found that useful and is ever drop us a line if you need any help.
Time to improve or build your testimonials page?
Why not test us out …
