The power of social proof in service - how the voices of your customers influence your success

Customer reviews are becoming increasingly important in the digital age. They are also valuable in service because services are much less tangible and tangible than products. How do we turn this fact to our advantage?

Social proof can not only influence the purchasing decision of new customers, but also increase satisfaction after the purchase. Consciously addressing this aspect and giving your customers a voice can therefore bring double benefits.

Negative opinions have a stronger impact!

Bad news sells better than good news! This is a widespread realization in the media world. Unfortunately, this is also the case with customer reviews. On the one hand, customers who are very dissatisfied with a service tend to communicate their anger to others in some way. More often than happy customers, they make others aware that they were dissatisfied with a service.

These dissatisfied voices also attract far more attention from potential customers. If you have a coffee stain on your jacket during a customer meeting, this is also guaranteed to attract more attention than the fact that your suit is 99% clean. It's the same with customer reviews. For these reasons, we should encourage our happy customers to share their opinions.

What role does this play in machine-related services?

On Amazon or, for example, in the Google Play store on our cell phone, it is a matter of course for us to be able to scroll to the customer reviews before making a purchase. This gives us a good overview of what customers who have already bought the item or app think before they buy.

Service customers in mechanical engineering do not have this advantage! This is both a blessing and a curse for us. Because of course it is nice if not every dissatisfied customer can make their experience known to a wide audience in 2 minutes, but usually has to complain to you personally. In this way, we can make improvements and eliminate the error before the general desire to buy is dampened.

However, this also has two disadvantages, especially if you fail to proactively collect customer feedback. Firstly, many unhappy customers will simply not complain at all, but will disappear silently from your customer file because they shy away from the direct complaint route. As a result, useful feedback that you actually want to use to improve your offering is lost.

But please also think about how safe you feel when you buy an item or a paid app from these online services and see that the seller or the app has a customer rating of 4.8 or 4.9 out of 5 stars. This is exactly what we are missing when selling services in our industry! This contributes to the fact that, as a buyer of machine-related services, I cannot assess exactly what I am buying. And when in doubt, I prefer not to do business.

How do I use social proof and implement suitable measures in service?

If we consider the advantages and disadvantages of our specific situation as described above, we can come to the conclusion that we are actually in a very fortunate position. This is because the disadvantages are particularly significant if we do not consciously tackle the issue.

Due to the lack of transparency, in most cases we have to become active ourselves in order to share our customers' experiences and thus give new customers the security they need to make a good deal. But it also allows us to pre-sort. Our dissatisfied customers should be the absolute minority anyway and we can resolve our differences with them in private.

The task therefore remains to share positive feedback from customers publicly. In addition to the Quantifying the benefits of servicesone of the most important tools for selling services.

Ask yourself the question, which Customer touchpoints You should also pay more attention to sharing your customers' experiences via these channels. After all, buyers don't just want to rely on your own self-promotion and advertising measures. Psychologically, it is very important to know that when you buy a service, you are joining a large number of already happy customers.

To do this, you can create testimonials and experience reports yourself and share them on your website, in advertising flyers or on various social media channels. This is relatively easy to implement, but should definitely be done on a large scale for this very reason.