Using Trustpilot reviews to find switching customers

Where Trustpilot fits

G2 and Capterra review software. Trustpilot reviews almost anything sold online: banks, couriers, web hosts, payment processors, phone and broadband providers, marketplaces, agencies, insurers, shops. That breadth is the reason to use it. If your competitors are service businesses that small companies depend on, their customers are complaining here, not on a software review site.

It is also the reason to be careful. Most Trustpilot reviewers are consumers. The work is separating the business owner who lost three days of sales to a payment outage from the shopper whose parcel was late.

Which markets it suits

If your competitors have few or no Trustpilot reviews, use G2 or Capterra instead.

Spotting a business reviewer and a real signal

Trustpilot profiles rarely state a job or company, so read the text. Business customers give themselves away:

• "our customers", "our shop", "our account manager", "my business"
• mentions of invoices, VAT, a merchant account, a website going down, orders not shipping
• money in the hundreds or thousands lost, not the price of one item
• a business name signed at the end, or a reply from the company addressing them by business name

Then judge the complaint. Strong signals:

1. "Moving to another provider" or "looking for alternatives". They have decided and are choosing.
2. A specific, repeated failure: "third outage this month", "funds held for two weeks again".
3. A contract or price shock: "renewed at double the price without warning".
4. Support breakdown: "no reply for ten days", "passed between departments".

Weak signals: one-line rants, reviews about a single bad delivery, and complaints about something every provider in the category does.

How to do it by hand

1. Open each competitor's Trustpilot page and filter to one- and two-star reviews.
2. Sort by most recent. Read the last two or three months first.
3. Mark each review as business or consumer using the clues above. Discard consumers.
4. Read the company's replies. A reply that resolves the issue lowers the lead's value; a stock apology or none at all raises it.
5. Identify the business from the review text, signature or the reviewer's other reviews.
6. Write to the failure they described, briefly, with what you do differently and one piece of evidence, such as your published uptime or support hours.

Allow thirty minutes per competitor for a first pass. The consumer filter is what takes the time.

What you can and cannot learn

You can learn: a display name, country, how many reviews they have written, the date, the star rating and the text. Their other reviews sometimes reveal their trade (a bakery reviewing a flour supplier, a packaging firm and a courier).

You usually cannot learn: their company, role or contact details. Many reviewers use a first name only. Expect to identify a minority of business reviewers, and to treat the rest as evidence of what customers in your market hate.

Rules and etiquette

Trustpilot's guidelines for businesses deal mostly with how a company handles its own reviews. They encourage replies that answer questions and resolve issues, and say to keep replies "polite and professional" without "personal information, threats, or aggressive language". There is no route for a third party to reply to a competitor's reviews, and you should not try to create one with fake reviews or reviewer accounts.

When you write to a business you identified:

• Make it about their problem, not the competitor's failings.
• Do not quote their review back at length; they know what they wrote.
• If they are a UK sole trader, the UK regulator treats them as an individual for marketing email (details on the local business listings page).

Why it fails

• Mostly consumers. In many categories, the business reviewers are a small minority.
• Anonymous names. "Sam" from the UK is hard to find.
• Complaints already resolved. Check whether the company replied and fixed it.
• Timing. A business that has just moved provider in anger will not move again for a while; arrive before, during, or long after.

How Sluice does it

Paste a Trustpilot review page into Sluice and its reviewers become leads, each with their stars beside their words. Each is looked up where a match can be found and scored 0 to 100 against your customer profile, with separate judgements on whether they are worth approaching and whether the review suggests the problem is current. The scoring reads the text, so a consumer complaining about a late parcel scores low against a profile aimed at business customers. Reviewers at 70 or more are worth contacting, each linked back to the review.

The honest limit: Trustpilot gives little identity, so many reviewers will not resolve to a company, and the scorer can only work from their words. For software competitors, G2 yields more identifiable reviewers. For app competitors, see the App Store.