How to land 5-star reviews every time - my top 5 key ingredients for successfully attaining brilliant reviews

After five years of building a track record of being able to generate outstanding five-star reviews and NPS scores, I figured it was time for me to share what I believe are the five key ingredients to obtaining not just five stars but the sensational comments to accompany them.

It's now been over eleven years since I was exposed to customer experience metrics and developed a true understanding of what they meant to a business, and throughout the past eleven years, I've been privileged enough to observe various different attitudes toward customer experience metrics, from how and why they're collected, to how they're relayed to employees, and ultimately how they’re acted upon. I've seen millions of dollars spent, all kinds of approaches adopted, from scientific, to philosophical, and even esoteric to try to ensure that at the end of an interaction, a customer highlights all five stars and leaves a dazzling comment. And after eleven years it's still clear that there's a huge gap between those that do it well and those left wanting.

So without further ado, here are my top five key ingredients for ensuring that you create incredible experiences with five-star reviews in mind.

Number one: use your imagination

If like most businesses, your marketing strategy and repeat business relies heavily on the reviews and recommendations left by your customers, then it's important to sit down with your team and ask yourselves when and how often they think about reviews. Is it before the interaction starts, is it during the interaction, or is it at the end?

The best chefs, hosts, business owners, entrepreneurs, and founders all think about five-star reviews before an interaction even starts. They base their entire customer experience on the idea of not only creating a memorable experience but also obtaining a five-star review.

Instead of thinking of customer interactions as business transactions, they think of them as personal experiences, they think about creating experiences that they’d want to create for their close family, friends, and loved ones. And the ones that do this successfully are the ones that almost always achieve incredible results.

Number two: follow-through

Once you’ve had a think about what your five-star customer experience should look like, it’s time to follow through. An ideal customer experience isn’t an ideology, it’s not a mantra, it’s not one of those tacky motivational posters that are stuck at the back of the office and never looked at. Creating a five-star customer experience comes down to absolutely everything you do between your first and last impressions; from the preparation, the welcome, and the execution, to the education you provide, and your goodbye. It involves being passionate, it involves being patient, and it involves having a first-timers attitude. What is a first-timers attitude? It’s an attitude where even though you’ve done something a thousand times, you still treat it like it’s the first time for you and everyone else involved.

Number three: there will be a next time

Another key ingredient for creating five-star customer experiences is to create them with the intention that there will be a next time. Despite the nature of your business meaning that you might rarely ever interact with a customer, client, or a group of people more than once, you have to do your best to ensure that you enter every single interaction with a mindset that there will be a next time. You have to put yourself in that customer’s shoes and you have to imagine them wanting to return to your business because they had such an incredible experience with you. You have to imagine what that looks like and then you have to provide an experience that has your customer wanting to come back again whether it’s likely to happen or not.

Number four: ask

Now, if you’re going to go to all of the trouble of nailing points one, two and three above then I believe that you’re well within your rights to ask for a review.

Nowadays most people that engage with businesses understand how vital reviews are for them. Many people have either left reviews or have chosen whether or not to engage with a business based on its reviews.

Back in the day, I used to teach people how to skateboard for free. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, I made a ton of new friends and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had absolutely no intention of taking anyone’s money in exchange for a skate lesson. But when I realised that my customers and I were creating some really memorable experiences together, I decided to start asking for reviews in order to record these incredible experiences and be able to one day look back on them fondly. This turned out to be a great move for many reasons, but most importantly it taught me how to ask. After the first few lessons, I started asking every single person that came for a free skate lesson for a review and simply asking proved to be extremely effective.

A strategy I employed in order to assist with this was making it clear to my customers when they booked the lesson that the lesson would be free but in exchange for a review, so right from the get-go they knew what was coming and what was requested of them.

Another strategy I used was to remind my customers right at the very end of the lesson, at the very peak of their exhilaration, to write their reviews as soon as possible so that they could articulate their thoughts and emotions whilst still feeling in the moment. This also proved to be extremely effective, and along with nailing points one, two and three it lead to an incredible number of five-star reviews.?

Number five: educate

This might sound weird to you, but occasionally it’s also actually your responsibility to educate your customer on how to leave a review. Now, this doesn’t apply to every customer, but then you won’t know who it will and won’t apply to. But when you think about it, people aren’t educated in the art of leaving reviews, literally, anyone can leave one without truly understanding the etiquette of reviewing and quite often, people will leave a review when feeling emotionally charged to do so, and we all know that doesn’t always go so well.

It’s important for you to know what kinds of things you want your customers to say in their reviews. For example, do you want them to talk about the weather or the location? Do you want them to leave comments about bystanders that had nothing to do with the interaction? Or do you want them to talk about you and your business specifically? The nature of the interaction? And the way they felt when they were interacting with you?

It’s important to be really specific and know what you want your customers to say in their reviews, not only so that you can plan to create the perfect experience for them, but also so that when asking for a review you can provide them with some gentle prompts and reminders about some of the things that they experienced that they might want to mention in the review.

You might also want to mention that the rowdy pack of teenagers that attempted to ruin a certain part of the experience could not have been helped, and although you can apologise sincerely, they should remember to only rate their experience based on things that were within the host’s control. This small but crucial piece of education can make all the difference when attempting to attain five stars and sensational comments.

So there you have it

My five tips for being able to nail incredible five-star reviews. What are your thoughts, did I miss anything?

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My name is Lui Diaz; I’m a children’s author, illustrator, skateboarding teacher, and podcaster, not the kind of guy whose words you’d normally be reading. But if you’re looking for new perspectives and the odd laugh, you’re in the right place! Please subscribe here or find me on?Substack?or?Medium?for more lighthearted and evocative content :)