A few tips for assessing the credibility and trustworthiness of B2B reviews

When making big purchase decisions, like buying a brand new car or choosing between the latest washing machine models, people won’t drop a lot of cash without doing at least a little due diligence first. Whether this involves doing some research on review sites or simply asking friends, family, and colleagues to weigh in with their experience-based opinions, as shoppers, we are constantly seeking the validation of others to feel confident in our decision-making. 

The same rules apply when businesses begin searching for new software or solutions—including those for their talent acquisition, talent management, or learning and development needs.

After all, why evaluate your options based solely on what those companies have to say about themselves when you can gain valuable insights from people already using those products and services? In fact, there are a lot of powerful stats around word of mouth (WOM) marketing that underscore the value in getting a second, yet qualified opinion before taking the plunge. One that stands out posits that people are “four times more likely to buy a product or work with a business when referred by friends.” 

And while you may not always have friends that can give you in-depth insight into talent management solutions, there are, fortunately, plenty of customer reviews out there that can. 

Fair warning: Not all vendor websites or review sites are created equal. So you have to do a little of your own due diligence before taking everything that you read at face value. 

How to determine the quality of B2B customer reviews

It’s important to note that there’s no real science here. Part of sifting through customer testimonials and customer reviews—as is customary and expected when making big consumer purchase decisions—revolves around trusting your gut and being able to pinpoint when certain reviews just seem too good to be true or lacking valuable or relevant information. 

Even so, there are a few key criteria to keep in mind to ensure you’re always getting the most (genuine) value out of B2B customer reviews: 

1. Number of Reviews

Quality over quantity is always the most important factor here. And knowing that many vendors and solutions providers are not always that good about prioritizing customer reviews within their marketing efforts, especially on their own websites, a small number of customer reviews shouldn’t be an immediate red flag. It just means you have to do a little more digging on B2B customer review sites as well as researching trusted analyst reviews to see if the business is painting a more rosey picture on their own website than what actual customers are saying about them elsewhere. 

2. Recency of Reviews

The world of tech, including the rapidly evolving HR tech space, is constantly coming out with new innovations, features, solutions, initiatives, and more. If the only “recent” customer reviews you can find date back to a year or two (or longer), it’s a problem. But it doesn’t mean a vendor has something to hide. It could just mean that the company stopped prioritizing asking customers for reviews and, instead, focused on perfecting their new innovations before getting customers to chime in openly about them. 

Even so, a big gap in reviews can potentially mean that customers aren’t talking about the product experience in the here and now, which not only makes the published reviews outdated but also means they could be missing some important pieces of information that are relevant today. Ideally, and in conjunction with point number one above, you want to look for a steady flow of new customer reviews over time, especially on B2B customer review sites. 

3. Quality of Review Content

Before diving in here, quickly think about the last time you left a review. How in-depth did you get? Are you one of those people who just checks off the “stars” or the “smiley faces” when leaving a review or are you like some of those people on Amazon (you know who I’m talking about) who write essays and include pictures of their experiences? There’s nothing wrong if you fall into either of these categories. Some people are simply much more excited about sharing their opinions than others. But when you’re wading through customer reviews, you should take both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of reviews into consideration. 

Now, if someone has taken the time to write a personal tome based on their experience with a product or solution, take the time to read it. It’s there that you’ll find nuggets of thoughtful insight that can shape your decision-making process in a positive way. Not to mention, whether the review is positive or negative, it might shed a little more light around why a product, service, or solution received a specific average star-rating—even from reviewers who didn’t write much. 

4. Reviewer Validation

While it pains me to say this, the unfortunate reality is that there are a lot of vendors that leverage bots to up their (fake) customer review game. We’ve seen it happen on Amazon, leading to a massive, yet somewhat fruitless crackdown in recent years, which means that it’s entirely possible the same could happen on both a brand’s site or on B2B review sites. And while these bots are getting more sophisticated by the day, making it hard to discern what’s real versus fake, there are ways of verifying some of this one your own. 

Are you able to click on someone’s username to see that they are, indeed, a real person? Are most reviews posted anonymously (red flag!)? On a brand’s site, do you see nothing but five-star reviews but, when looking elsewhere, the ratings are much lower? The list of tactics that people have put into action to trick potential customers into thinking one way or another about a company is mind-boggling. Not to mention, some companies will enlist their own employees to stack the deck in their favor while, in a more nefarious approach, competitors will purposely write negative reviews to bring a competitor’s ratings down. So, needless to say, you’ve got to take every precaution to ensure you aren’t falling into these traps.  

Trustworthy B2B review sites for talent management solutions

As mentioned above, there are a lot of customer review sites floating around the interwebs. A handful are great while the vast majority leave much to be desired. 

In the realm of HR tech, there are two B2B review sites that stick out to us in a positive way: 

G2

Founded in 2012, G2 is a pioneer in the B2B software reviews space, today boasting around five million unique visitors to its site each month across 1,950 product categories. Even more, it receives an average of 40k visits to its “corporate learning management systems” category page each month, a good sign for the site’s overall credibility. G2 also ticks all of the boxes, based on our criteria above: 

• Number of reviews: 1,216,500+ reviews at the time of writing this article. 
• Recency of reviews: New customer reviews are being added to the site every day, ensuring that the feedback and insights provided are always up-to-date.
• Quality of review content: Aside from traditional quantitative review methods (i.e. starts), there are a number of question fields, including “likes” and “dislikes,” within the customer review template that prompt reviewers to provide more in-depth feedback. 
• Reviewer validation: Aside from putting in strict community guidelines, G2 has a (human) team that’s dedicated to verifying and publishing reviews within 48 hours of them being submitted. They also display how the reviewer has been validated—whether via LinkedIn profile or company email address—and provide how that review was generated, whether it be organically or from a vendor-driven WOM campaign. 

TrustRadius

Ever since its launch in 2012, TrustRadius has lived up to its mission of “connecting buyers and vendors with the most trusted content.” With one million unique visitors to its site each month across 550 product categories and an average of 5,000 monthly visits to its "Corporate LMS" category page, TrustRadius is a B2B customer review site that practices what it preaches: 

• Number of reviews: 260K+ reviews and ratings from 100% verified users.
• Recency of reviews: New customer reviews are being added to the site every day, ensuring that the feedback and insights provided are always up-to-date.
• Quality of review content: Reviewers are encouraged to go in-depth via a more detailed review process, in an effort to help others make better purchase decisions. As such, the average review on the site is around 400+ words.  
• Reviewer validation: TrustRadius verifies and vets every review before it is published via a team of human moderators that assess review legitimacy across a variety of criteria. A great example of this is when a reviewer uses a personal email address instead of a company-provided email address. When this happens, the moderators do a little extra digging to ensure that reviewers actually work for the company they say they work for. For this reason, TrustRadius strongly encourages reviewers to authenticate via LinkedIn. Additionally, and most importantly, the company does not offer any “pay to play” solutions, as a way to underscore the importance of quality and credibility. 

A review can be worth its weight in gold

The moral of the story here is simple: If you’re making a big purchase decision—whether on behalf of your company or for yourself—it’s important to ensure that the input you’re getting about those products, services, and solutions from third parties, whether on a brand’s website or via customer review sites, is credible and trustworthy. 

We’ve given you some tips on how to assess this information so that you can make the best decisions possible. But as mentioned before, some of it comes down to common sense and trusting your gut. If the information presented seems too good (or too negative) to be true, there’s a good chance you’re right. Be sure you trust vendors and review sites that not only have a steady flow of up-to-date reviews but also do the hard work of ensuring all reviews are verified for credibility. After all, when making an important purchase, you never want bad, outdated, or outright fake information to sway you into making a bad decision that you’ll come to regret down the road.