What to ask your agency about product reviews

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on product reviews, these questions are worth asking early.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Reviews answer the questions your copy avoids. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Reply to bad reviews in public, calmly. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

What this looks like day to day

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about product reviews before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Reviews answer the questions your copy avoids — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.