Website Customer Testimonials, Useful or Useless?

You’re seeking a new business to fulfill a certain need you have for your own business. You search on the web for reliable businesses in which to choose. You find “Bob’s Useful Services’” website and they seem to have what you’re looking for, so far so good. You find that Bob’s has included a testimonials page from their past and present clients that (not surprisingly) raves on and on regarding the wonderful benefits of using a company like Bob’s Useful Services. Words like, ‘Amazing’, ‘Wonderful’, ‘Superior’, ‘The Best’ all come screaming from the page. “This is the one”, you decide, “they must be good, all these people have such great things to say.”

Hold on a minute! (record scratch sound) Who are all these people? Are they even real people? Are you sure that the website owners did not come up with those testimonials themselves? Alternatively, maybe they hired a marketing firm to write those rave reviews. How can testimonials on any website be trusted? Without some sort of reliability check, they really can’t!

Reliable Testimonials

If a testimonial is true, then there is a real person or company behind the words of that testimonial. I would dare to say that the majority of website testimonials are fraudulent. It’s like this; if I gave you my resume and listed a bunch of outstanding references for past employers and co-workers you might be impressed. As you attempt to contact these individuals, you find that there is no contact information for any of them. I conveniently tell you that all of those people wanted to retain their privacy and you cannot have their contact info. How valid would those references be then?

The same is true for testimonials. It may stand to reason that most website’s don’t publish the contact info for their loyal customers who gave their heart-felt accolades, but; they should have an arrangement with any testimonial provider similar to a reference. In other words, the testimonial providers need to stand behind their words, and the website publishing these testimonials should have that mechanism in place for potential customers to check. Testimonials are essentially published references and they must be made available to check out.

Don’t believe it

I’m skeptical by nature so I give testimonials almost no weight. Being a web designer, I have been sent testimonial pages from my clients that I was quite certain were a work a fiction even though the client claimed they were real (with some minor editing to clean them up). I know that the testimonials on my site are real and I know that they are from real people who wrote the words on that page. If you wanted to contact those people, you can contact me and I will arrange it. I admit that I don’t bother with checking testimonials on other sites anyway; I just ignore them. I think that many experienced Internet savvy folks do the same. Testimonials are questionable by nature since they are completely subjective and have nothing to do with the experience you may have with that business.

Bottom Line:

Although testimonials may seem to enhance business appeal, it only convinces those who don’t think past 10 minutes in the future (admittedly, many people). Even legitimate testimonials will appear as useless information to the skeptic, and rightly so. You can use them on your site, but make sure they are legit; otherwise, you’re just a liar. Once a client finds out that those testimonials are bogus, you just lost trust and credibility. That’s bad business.

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