A Gartner Brand Trust Survey concluded that 81% of customers refuse to do business with or buy from a brand they don’t trust, and 89% expect to disengage from a brand that breaches their trust.

‍Let’s look at it from a specific brand’s perspective: You have built an amazing product, any time you meet a user or ask for feedback via survey or emails, they can’t stop raving about it and yet you are not able to showcase and capitalize on this feedback that well.

‍Why? Because there is nothing in your product or service where a prospect can find these honest experiences and maybe ask for feedback from an existing customer. You post these screenshots on social media channels and use them in your ad campaigns but it lacks the element of trust that organic sharing does.

Enter — in-app customer testimonials feed. Suddenly people can share their experience, ask questions to other users about specific concerns, and feedback on a specific feature or a person (if you offer coaching and mentorships).

By adding customer testimonials you have unlocked the ability to:

- Showcase the trust your current users have in your product,

- Enable a channel for future customers to seek honest feedback before buying,

- Retain users by highlighting positive outcomes, something that is extra important in cases where the time to value is longer or the business model is subscription-based.

Breaking Down Testimonials: What Is It and Why You Should Enable The Feature In Your Product At Scale

Testimonials are personal accounts from users about their experience with your product, highlighting its impact on their lives. Unlike reviews, which can be brief and impersonal, customer testimonials are often more detailed and emotive, providing a deeper insight into the nuanced experience of an existing user.

Customer testimonials also talk about user satisfaction but in their own words and through a narrative and the journey. They highlight not only the features and benefits of the product but also the transformation it brings to the user. This narrative is powerful in building trust as it shows real people achieving real results.

Building trust at scale is crucial for any tech or product leader, to boost metrics such as ARPU, NPS, LTV, etc and testimonials are an invaluable tool in this process. By enabling users to share their experience a product manager can unlock insights into the most valuable features of the product thus helping improve the product roadmap too.

Features to Consider When Building a Customer Testimonial Feed

Creating a user-generated content (UGC) feature, like a testimonial feed, can be challenging. The reason is you need to iteratively figure out how to enable behaviors that you want without adding a lot of burden for the user while also making it exciting and rewarding enough for them to share the testimonials. Based on these you need to plan the the corresponding engineering, design, infra, and other resource requirements. Let’s look at each of them:

The Behavioral And User-Centric

Before you add things to the product roadmap and assign tasks to the engineering teams, you need to understand what behaviors you want to drive and the kind of user experience you want to design.

1. User Identity and Profiles: Do you want to link customer testimonials to user profiles or keep them anonymous? Do users have the option to choose between the two? How do you add authenticity and allow prospective customers to reach out for more information in case of anonymous customer testimonials?
2. Testimonial Sharing: What is the format that will showcase the transformation best? Should you add the option to add periodic progress pictures of a user? Would this show in their personal timeline, on the universal feed or both? What media formats between videos, images, or audio recordings should you incorporate? How do you nudge people towards the intended format via feature design?
3. Ease of Submission: How do you make it simple and rewarding for users to submit their testimonials? What kind of prompts or questions you should have to guide them in sharing their experiences?
4. Social Validation & Engagement: How do you encourage people to share their experiences at different stages of their journey? How do you add social engagement and encouragement to build trust through camaraderie? How do you ensure that the experience remains safe and healthy for the users?
5. Analytics, Recommendations, and Tagging: Should users be able to see the engagement analytics? If coaching is part of your product should the coaches show on a user's profile? Should there be a design and capability difference for a user vs coach profile (adding their progress vs booking a session), Can users tag other users and coach? Should they be able to link a product in their post or in comments?
6. Moderation Criteria & Tools: How do you empower the moderation team by adding reporting, flagging, and review features that can help ensure the content is appropriate and high quality while reducing manual effort for them? Do you need to have tags such as NSFW, spam, etc? What should be the criteria for it and how do these flags impact what shows to a user and their profile status?

The Engineering

Let’s look at the engineering side of these behaviors and tools:

1. User profile and related: Guest user, profile creation and handling for a logged-in vs guest user, user authentication, user feed, and customization of the same, follow graph, titles and badges display (if any).

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2. Engagement related: Universal vs custom feed, the logic for customization for each user, topic, and category creation, like, comment, share, etc. on a post as well as engagement on such posts, ordering logic for posts and comments on them.

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3. Multimedia related: image, video, audio, gif, and pdf uploads along with corresponding size, dimensions limits as well as optimizations for quality while compressing any media.

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4. Moderation related: Flagging content based on specific keywords, reporting by users with an option to add reasons to choose, review of those reports by the moderation team, deletion rights with or without informing the user of the same, etc.

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‍5. Others: Design requirements for the UI of each action, widgets, etc. infra requirements, and decisions related to version updates.

At this point, it is important to consider the options between building in-house or using a 3rd party solution for customer testimonials based on criteria important to your goals and constraints.

Also read: Build or Integrate: Deciding Factors for Feed Feature

Benefits of Building Testimonials

Building a robust testimonial feature brings several benefits, helping you achieve various objectives. Let’s look at this from some of the usual KPIs of a Product Manager and how having a testimonial feature can help achieve those:

1. Conversion: Testimonials act as social proof, increasing the likelihood that a new user will convert. For instance, a new user might be convinced to sign up for a premium plan after reading about another user's positive experience.
2. Retention/Repurchase/Renewal: Highlighting positive outcomes can encourage current users to continue using the product. For example, a user considering canceling their subscription might decide to stay after reading testimonials about long-term benefits.
3. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Testimonials can lower CAC by leveraging word-of-mouth marketing. Users sharing their positive experiences can attract new customers at a lower cost than traditional advertising.
4. Lifetime Value (LTV) and Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): Engaged users who share their stories are likely to be more loyal, increasing their LTV and ARPU.
5. Churn Rates: By continuously showcasing success stories, you can reduce churn rates as users see the ongoing value in your product.

Fittr: A Case Study Of Business Growth Through Testimonials:

A fitness platform that caters to a range of audiences and provides personalized fitness plans, diet charts, and wellness advice. The platform started as a group on Facebook and initially grew through word of mouth and the founder(s)' personal branding. However, as they scaled, they needed to focus on a bigger TAM and wanted to capitalize on a tried and tested strategy but now at Scale i.e. Testimonials. They built a testimonial feed, focused on different aspects of their audience, the end user, and the coaching provider, and catered to their needs accordingly — all of it flowing into the overall product experience. Let us break it down:

Empowering End Users:

Some of the biggest challenges anyone faces in their journey are lack of guidance, inability to stay consistent, and moral support. Fittr solved all three by adding a few features:

Guidance

A person goes through different stages and challenges in their fitness journey and may need guidance for a range of things. By adding a questions and answers section which they call “discussions” Fittr allowed users to ask their queries which can be answered by both coaches and other users. This helps them get expert input as well as community input. The option to save a discussion helps passive users too who may have the same question but prefer to be less socially visible. The engagement from the rest of the users in the form of likes, comments, etc. helps create a sense of solidarity and belonging for the person asking.

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Consistency

Sharing journey and transformation helps users see with data their own progress. By having users from different ages and walks of life, the brand is able to create a sense of relatability and instil the idea that “Fitness is for everyone not just for athletes, and goes beyond visible abs”.

This also helps other users in staying consistent. Most of the users in these posts talk about the before & after status of their weight, fitness levels, etc. along with pictures. Many of these posts also have mention of the specific role of the coach by the user. The coach profiles are clickable meaning if another user is interested, they can find the coach information directly, connect with them, and opt for a plan that’s suitable for them.

The default mention of the coach along with the descriptive experience shared by the user and an option to chat with the user helps in:

1. Building trust about the product
2. Building trust about the quality of coaches
3. Provides visibility to coaches and thus boosts their clientele
4. A way for a prospect to ask for specific feedback from an existing user, i.e., addressing a prospect's concern who has an intention to buy.
5. Revenue growth for the business by highlighting the product's utility through honest customer testimonials.

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Empowering Coaches

Coaches are the other half of Fittr’s product equation. From custom meal plans to exercise regimes, these people offer a range of services focusing on a range of goals such as weight loss, pre/postnatal care, injury recovery, and more. The need for these people is branding, visibility, and capturing clients for their paid services.

Branding and Visibility

By creating a coach profile, Fittr allowed coaches to highlight their skills. Having sections such as followers, number of transformations, ratings, specialty, chat button, and paid plans, Fittr created a comprehensive place for the coaches to showcase everything they need to highlight to convert a potential client. Since these transformational testimonials and ratings are publicly visible, it creates accountability for the coach while also creating social proof of their work. If a user sees bodybuilding-related feedback in the transformation and review, it increases the confidence in the coach's specialty learning to higher chances of purchase and renewal by a current or future customer.

Capturing Clients

Fittr offers a range of plans with different pricing based on the coach’s experience level and user needs. The app has finer features such as:

1. highlights a recommended plan for a user based on the information they shared about their current status and goals
2. A ticker in the bottom highlighting factors like money back guarantee and coach change option, EMI, etc. to add further trust
3. Payment gateway and choices within the app to reduce friction for the coach as well as user

Product Growth Loop

Fittr caters to the needs of both end users and coaches by creating a loop for trust building through various interaction, engagement, and feedback-sharing options. This helps them:

1. Retain users for long enough to showcase the value through consistency
2. Upsell services when a user’s goals get updated and all
3. Gather feedback, input and prospects for any of the future product or services they may launch within the health and wellness category

Conclusion

Testimonials are a powerful tool for tech and product leaders aiming to build trust at scale. By integrating a testimonial feed into your product, you can enhance conversion rates, improve user retention, lower acquisition costs, and ultimately drive business growth. The journey from a satisfied customer to a brand advocate starts with a story, and testimonials are the perfect medium to share these stories with the world.