The problem with Website Testimonials

We come across testimonials or endorsements on virtually every website we visit. Typically, they contain a few lines of kind words that a customer has supplied when they have received good service or a great product from that company.

We think that it is tremendously important for a company to demonstrate to its website visitors that it has a good stream of happy customers, and as such are advocates of testimonials on websites. However, we believe there are several problems with listing these on websites :

1. There is no guarantee that the testimonial was actually written by an actual customer – how do you know that the website owner didn’t just make it up and supply a false name? More to the point – how can you convince YOUR WEBSITE VISITORS that you haven’t made them up?

2. Many website owners have multiple businesses, with many products and different services. They receive testimonials for all of these and then need to manage each of their website pages to display the testimonials. This requires the opening up of website code or a content management system every time they get a new testimonial

How do we overcome these problems?

Thinking about it logically, we realised that it made sense to have a central repository for all testimonials, where a person could register an account and then add all of their testimonials, regardless of which of their companies, or which product or service, the testimonial applied to.
We then ask each of the testimonial givers (the customers of the person wanting to list the testimonial) to verify that they are happy with the wording.

Then, the website owner creates widgets (little pieces of code that determine the size and colour scheme of their testimonials) that they then insert into their website at the points they want to display the testimonials. Any number of different widgets can be built, allowing website owners to create different styled widgets for different websites, and also allow them to choose which testimonials were displayed by each widget.

Is all of this possible, we hear you say?

Try this…  Start managing your testimonials with vouchforthis

An example of vouchforthis…

The following list of testimonials is actually a widget built on the vouchforthis website. They are real testimonials that my clients have provided, and I use vouchforthis to manage them. Now, every time I add another testimonial it will automatically show here, and when my customers verify them they will appear with the little green tick symbol…

Other examples of vouchforthis testimonials can be seen on other pages on this website. For example, you can see some Project Management testimonials and some Web Marketing testimonials. Every time I add another project management or web marketing testimonial to vouchforthis I will be sure that they are correctly and immediately reflected in these web pages.