Managing testimonials

Every testimonial that you do not record is a loss to your project or company. Not only can good feedback be used to promote your cause but it is an inspiration to your people. Imagine if you owned a brick and mortar store and people stood outside telling those entering how happy they are with the service they got. Do you think that would improve sales? A website can do even more.

Classifying testimonials and feedback

It is a very good idea to classify testimonials. In most cases this will be by product or service. If people are interested in widgets they want to see testimonials specifically about widgets. If testimonials are recorded in a database they each will have an accompanying classification, or even multiple classifications.

What to record about the feedback

You should record the date, the persons name and address, the text of the testimonial itself, the category or classification (e.g. is it about your website, a product, a service, a person in your organization) and a rating. By a rating, I mean a score (typically 1 to 10) of how good a testimonial it is. Obviously, if someone says your product is better than sex, for example, that would be a 10! As you can see, I am talking about more than feedback. Normally one or two sentences or phrases will crystallize what they have said, that is a testimonial.

How to record and manage testimonials and feedback

There is no question that testimonials need to be recorded in an on-site database with the appropriate administration tools. They need to be recorded by your staff and edited to remove irrelevant parts. Thus testimonials are a company asset that must be managed. It will become more and more obvious as you read on that you need a database to do this. If you should never miss an opportunity to record a testimonial then you should also not miss an opportunity to record the people who visit your site. That means you need an on-site people database with a login system so the site knows who they are and can keep building on the information it knows about them. Testimonials are then just a part of the people record system, they link to individuals. You can obviously see where I am going with this, you need to have us write you a custom system to manage all of this (if you really want a dreamsite).

How to present testimonials

A good reason why you need to record testimonials in a database rather than just compose and hand edit a testimonial web page is that you will want to present them in different ways on different pages. Obviously, you will want to display only testimonials about widgets on the widget page of your site, testimonials about your site on its home page, etc. Likewise, main pages might only display linked abbreviated versions of few randomly picked high score testimonials with a note about how many more there are on the testimonials page. Also differing amounts of detail will be appropriate at different times. For example, it might be appropriate to include the date, the initials and city of the person in some listings. In addition, you might decide to only display testimonials having a score of greater than 8 on the home page for a category and then display them all on a detail page. Likewise, you might want to display them ordered by highest to lowest score or by location. Thus, it is obvious that hand-editing a testimonials web page might be fine for a regular website but not for a dreamsite. Let's get real, showing the same testimonials everytime a page is displayed is a little like saying that these are your only happy customers! They really need to be different every time the page is refreshed. For an example, check the testimonials along the right side of the http://digitalfire.com home page. It is getting more obvious that you need a custom written system to manage all of this.

Prompting testimonials and feedback

Testimonials and feedback certainly do not need to come by accident (although they certainly often do). Your site needs an easy way to record testimonials and link them to a people record. You can provide a special page on your site that invites people to comment on your products or services and you can provide a link at the bottom of outgoing emails to notify people about the existence of this page. Likewise, your products themselves can include a note telling people to provide feedback. What if someone puts a complaint on your feedback page. Great. Deal with it promptly and specifically and they will come back and put a testimonial about that!

Only custom-written web components can go down any road you choose!

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