How Leaving Reviews Can Help Others and Improve Businesses

We’ve all experienced it. We go to one of our favorite stores or restaurants, and we suddenly have a bad experience. Perhaps it’s your first time visiting a new restaurant and the food and service level just wasn’t what you expected. Sometimes it can be frustrating, and other times it can be absolutely infuriating. Let’s flip the coin here. Maybe you’ve decided to give the new restaurant another shot. And from that point forward, the performance was stellar. Now, it’s your new favorite place. In the end, if we judged every business by a single interaction, we’d sure miss out on many great experiences.

Sharing your feedback is extra important. By leaving reviews of a company or product, it gives a snapshot when the business exceeded or failed expectations.

Check Into Cash conducted a recent survey to ask people what they think about Check Into Cash. Survey results are calculated from responses of 6,100 participants voting via email.

Using Reviews for Research

Leaving reviews can help others. Each review is like a snapshot in time about a business and how it’s performing. With enough of these moments pieced together, you can begin to see the big picture. In fact, you’ve probably researched a place of business before making the decision to visit, right? Virtually all of us have at some point.

Leaving Reviews Can Help Others

Speaking up with your opinion and sharing your experience provides another point of reference for people to make educated decisions about where they do business. And it’s not only customers who can use this. Smart companies keep an eye on their reviews. Whether customers are leaving reviews that are good or awful, businesses can understand what they’re doing well and where they should improve.

Reviews That Build Better Businesses

In many cases, a review might reflect an employee who had a bad day. Hey, we’re all human. However, leaving reviews provides consistent feedback so a business can easily pinpoint problem areas, and where they excel. That’s why it’s important to leave thorough, detailed reviews.

How to Leave a Complete Review

In order for your review to be most helpful, follow these simple steps:

1. Take a Moment to Reflect

If you’ve had a bad experience, take a moment to cool off before leaving reviews. Instead of unleashing all your rage at once, give yourself some time to assess the situation. Put yourself in an employee’s shoes. Be rational. If you’ve had a good experience, still take a moment to collect your thoughts. Try to pinpoint exactly what made this experience stand apart in your mind.

2. Add Important Details

Whether your experience was exceptional or terrible, don’t forget to tell the whole story, from beginning to end. What date/time did you visit? Was the business busy or empty? Was it a fully-staffed or bare-bones work shift? The more details you include, the more helpful your review will be for other customers and the business, too.

3. Be Constructive

Seriously, don’t just leave a one-word review that says, “Terrible.” If you’ve had a bad experience, explain what made it bad. Then, suggest what would make the situation better in the future. If you’ve had a good experience, explain what made it awesome. You can still suggest improvements, or even shoutout an employee by name who went above and beyond.

Leaving Reviews for Check Into Cash

Check Into Cash loves to hear what people have to say, even if the feedback is sometimes hard to swallow. After all, we’ve heard some terrible stuff. However, in order to make things better for our customers, we study your comments and try to improve what we do to benefit everyone.

Crunching Numbers

Here’s a specific example using our own numbers. At the time of this writing, Check Into Cash has an all-time rating of 4.65 out of 5 stars on Google, with over 16,000 reviews. This includes all of our stores across the nation. It’s not bad, but we want it to be as close to 5 stars as possible. We’re always trying to improve and it shows. The last three months averaged a 4.87-star rating. The last 30 days alone came in at a 4.91-star average. It’s easy to see that leaving reviews can help others and benefit businesses, too. From there, companies can take customer criticism and use it to improve the way they do business. So, next time you do business with Check Into Cash, or anyone, be sure to speak up. It’s one small step that can have a huge impact.