Trustpilot has many invitation methods to collect verified reviews. With any of these methods, you’ll generally need to supply the customer’s name, email, and something called a “Reference ID” (a.k.a. “Reference Number”). But what does this even mean?

Basically, this is any kind of identifier that you can use to tie back to a customer’s experience. Common examples include:

•  Order ID
•  Transaction Number
•  Ticket Number
•  Opportunity ID

If nothing like this exists, an easy alternative is to just use the current date, eg. 03-30-2023 or even a datetime stamp, eg. 1679599300299.

This means that the Reference ID will be different each time the customer has an experience with you. To help illustrate this, let’s take a look at an ecommerce example. If a customer places 3 separate orders with you over the last year, they’ll have 3 separate Order IDs. Therefore, each invitation will have a new Reference ID as well. This is what allows you to collect multiple invitations from the same customer over time.

⚠  If you don’t include any Reference ID, or if you use a static value like an Account ID, Customer Number, Phone Number, etc., then you’ll only be able to send your customer one invitation. All other invitations will NOT be delivered and will show a status of ‘Not Delivered - Reference Number Error’. 

💡  One easy way to turn a static value into a unique one is to combine the static value with the date. For example, you can take the customer’s Account ID (eg. ABC0001) and combine it with the date (eg. 03-30-2023) to form a Reference ID like: ABC0001_03-30-2023