Whether you’re looking to purchase a new shirt for yourself, a coffee machine for your family or a collaboration solution to deploy across your whole organization, it’s important to do your research — it’s Consumerism 101. But sometimes, just googling the product isn’t enough, especially when spam, ads and self-promotion drown those real customer reviews out. In this episode of Lifesize Live!, we sat down with CEO of TrustRadius Vinay Bhagat to talk about how powerful and critical authentic customer voice is in marketing.

Each year, $3.8 trillion are spent on enterprise technology and services, yet critical decisions are often made with insufficient or biased information. As a buyer, it’s hard to cut through the noise of high-level branding because, let’s face it, a lot of brands say the same thing. Everyone sells “the best of the best” with “world-class support,” and the more these organizations sugarcoat their products and only talk about what they excel at, the less believable they become.

By providing your customers a verified place to leave and read reviews and honest feedback, not only do you become more transparent with them and future customers, you also have a source to back up your organization’s claims of being the “best of the best.” Injecting authentic customer voice also lifts conversion rates — as a fellow customer, it’s more convincing to hear that a peer organization had a positive deployment and user experience than just hearing from the company you’re trying to buy from.

TrustRadius is a review platform aimed at providing buyers and vendors with honest, unbiased and authentic reviews of products in the tech industry. With more than 125,000 technology reviews and ratings from 47,000 verified customers, TrustRadius is dedicated to bringing transparency to the world of enterprise technology users through educating and creating a conversation with peers looking for similar tools. Each reviewer is authenticated, and every review is vetted and passed through the TrustRadius research team before publication to ensure that the feedback is truthful, trustworthy and transparent for the vendor’s and customer’s sakes.

Here at Lifesize, we take our TrustRadius reviews very seriously. Not only do we let the customer feedback pave the path for future product improvements and enhancements, it’s also a great platform to guarantee that we’re making our customers happy with our products. Through incorporating that authentic customer feedback into our sales and marketing conversations, we shape our company to become more intelligent and responsive, making that relationship between our team and our customers stronger, more personal and more proactive than before.