The Customer Is Always Right – About What Matters to Them

Customer feedback isn’t just about getting stars on Google. It’s one of the most powerful tools you have to grow your business, build trust, and improve your services.

In this article, I’ll show you how reviews and feedback can reduce customer anxiety, fuel your marketing, and even guide your business strategy. Plus, I’ve included a ready-to-use AI prompt to help you analyze your online reputation in minutes.

This article almost wrote itself. Maybe it should be a book and not just a newsletter article!

Oh, please stop me!

I really enjoyed compiling this helpful toolkit that should save you some effort and remind you of the many ways that customer feedback and reviews can benefit your business. It is much more than just reassuring new customers who read your online reviews … read on, find out how it reduces anxiety, helps with storytelling, is an investment in the future and helps with R&D. There are both marketing and business benefits.

I’m going to mention what I think are the most important benefits and inspire you to consider how it is applicable to your company. Then a search engine and AI are your next steps to explore more deeply.

Here’s a brief list of these benefits that I’ll cover below:

Marketing Benefits

• You show respect for your customers when you ask for a review

• Online reviews are like “word-of-mouth at scale”

• Reduces decision anxiety for future customers

• You help your customers feel helpful and like they are being heard

• A chance to turn a critic into a fan

• Feedback is like compound interest – it pays off over the long-term

• AI is biased towards strong reviews as it learns about your business reputation

  
  

Business Benefits

• The cheapest and fastest form of R&D

• Co-create your business with your customers

• Creates a culture of continuous improvement

• A measure of whether you are keeping your brand promise

• Aligns the team around what matters most to customers

At Yellow Pages we have over 700, 5 Star reviews. Many of them we asked for and I know sometimes it felt awkward to request this. We feel like we are imposing on someone but another way to look at it is that you are showing respect for your customers when you ask for a review. It is just another opportunity to let your customers feel seen and valued. Customers appreciated a chance to be invested in your success.

This 2025 Yellow Pages Google Reviewer understands the value of feedback:

“Arthur came in and he did a great job!!! Presented customer solutions for getting google reviews!”

If you are not already inclined to leave online reviews, I might suggest that you start. Call it reciprocity, if you are hoping to get some reviews then feed the system and leave some of your own. You never know how it all plays out, if Bob’s Auto leaves a review for a few local businesses where Bob likes to have lunch, then maybe someone who reads them will be favourably inclined to check out Bob’s place! And leave a review. A virtuous circle!

Online Reviews Are “Word-Of-Mouth” At Scale

Maybe you are wondering if the effort of managing online reviews is really worth it? You are not alone. Try thinking of them as word of mouth “at scale”. There is almost no stronger emotional driver when choosing to buy than seeing social proof of the business and there are more and more ways to open up your business to reviews online with Google, Yelp, and Facebook. When you expand your review opportunities you assist the online word of mouth machines.

Why Asking for Online Reviews Builds Trust

Happy customers are leaving reviews that are not just to help you, the business owner, but also to reduce the anxiety that future customers have when choosing a business. With online search tools and “Auto shop near me” maps tools, the choices available are often mind numbing. “Where should I go, who can I trust. I don’t want to make a bad decision.” Reviews can reduce loss aversion.

It is almost backwards thinking but so much of marketing is that way. You impose a task on your customers, and they are grateful. How is that? It is how customers frame your request and the fact that you are opening online channels for reviews. It shows that you are customer-centric and care to listen to their input and feedback. And, they get a chance to assist someone in making their choice. All of these are feel-good sensations that you’ve percolated by simply having a place to leave a review. Not all reviews will be 5 stars, so you’ve got to be prepared for that too. Maybe I’ll post another article on how to reply to reviews in a coming issue.

You’ll learn faster about what your customers need and feel by staying on top of your reviews. Many times, they will tell you before you know it, what your business does well or not so well. The sooner you start to collect this the better. A review system should be a business tool to help you make decisions, choose your marketing focus and improve your customer relationships.

Reviews also form a rich pool of marketing material. When you quote a customer the messaging feels “Real” and verified and sometimes the review is clever and amusing in a way that you’d not thought of. I read one review for a mechanic that read something like “I’ve gone through 3 husbands but I’m never leaving this mechanic”. That became a repeated mantra for this small one-man auto repair shop.

Now that so much searching on the internet is assisted by AI, it is important to remember that AI feeds on information that exists online and those reviews make up a part of their data and informs them when they are answering prompts. By encouraging reviews and repeating them on your online Channels, whether that be your website or socials, you’ll be helping AI form a favourable impression of your business.

Feedback As a Business Tool

Beyond a marketing tool, you can also treat your review system as part of a business process.

Since your customers often know what is broken before you do, it can be the best way to get ideas on ways to improve your business. No more guessing and if you open up digital social reviews like Google, then you may save yourself the need to conduct surveys, which can be time consuming to create and execute. You’ll also have a historical log of reviews and you can track if your star is rising or what dips it took along the way to get where you are and why.

That is not to say that feedback surveys have no value. Maybe you already have the tools. If your customer purchase experience is online then a “how did you like our product” email a few days after shipping can give you great input. Automating these is key and regularly checking the data and feedback so that you can reply to serious concerns and monitor the mood of your customers over a timeline. There are of course, batch survey tools like SurveyMonkey and others that make it easy to gather insights if your CRM or ecommerce tool is not easy to configure.

You’ve probably heard of a business practice called “continuous improvement”. A great principle upon which to guide your company’s direction. Reviews and surveys can play an obvious role in this as feedback rolls in, your team can quickly assess and respond when appropriate. It’s a great tool for motivating ongoing small and large changes. In this way you are co-creating the future of your business with your customers as partners in the process. This is something that can be celebrated internally and externally.

Are you living up to your “brand promise”? Again, reviews can help you understand that. If you are sending out surveys, be specific about what your brand promise is and get feedback. Search for words in your online reviews that refer to your brand promise and it’s principles and assess what they mean. If you have hundreds of reviews, copy paste them into a word document and ask AI to look for references to themes that reflect your brand promise and request an assessment. No need to read the hundreds of reviews and jot down notes. This should only take a few minutes to get insights boiled down from your entire review history.

How To Use AI To Analyze Your Reputation

Which brings me to using AI to check out how your company appears online. There are different levels of thoroughness to gathering this information, but I’ve included a prompt below that can get you started. You might choose a paid or free version of an AI tool like ChatGPT or Google's Gemini or maybe explore Perplexity since it often uses authoritative cited resources. It then provides a list of sources so you can see for yourself where the information came from.

Enjoy enriching your business with feedback and reviews. Here is your next step.

Try This Now: Use the AI prompt below in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to instantly analyze your online reputation. It’s like having a digital consultant on call.

🧠 AI Prompt: Online Reputation Check

Prompt: “Act as a digital reputation analyst for our business. Search for and analyze recent online reviews, ratings, and customer feedback about [Your Business Name] across platforms like Google, Yelp, Facebook, and industry-specific directories. Summarize the key themes, identify common praise and complaints, and highlight any trends in customer sentiment. Provide a short SWOT-style summary (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) based on the feedback. Then, suggest 3 actionable steps we can take to improve our online reputation and customer experience.”

🛠️ Optional Add-Ons:

You can customize the prompt further by adding:

• Timeframe: “...from the past 6 months.”

• Location: “...for our locations in Ontario.”

• Competitor Comparison: “...and compare it to [Competitor Name].”

• Tone: “...present the findings in a professional but conversational tone suitable for a leadership team.”

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