Online reviews matter, especially for small businesses. They offer you a likelihood to get unbiased feedback on how your small business can improve. However, low rankings may skew your average and jeopardize your ability to attract latest customers. According to Kelly Kurlychek of BetterReputation, a company that helps corporations and individuals maintain their online status, greater than 90% of potential customers look for reviews before making a purchase. “Your potential customers are searching for you on Google. If you do not show up at all, in a negative or even mediocre light, you lose business,” Kurlychek says.
So how do you avoid bad reviews? What will you do if they stand in your way?
Image source: Zohar Lazar
Adam Levy co-owns a yoga studio in Huntington, New York Healthy body and mindand deals uncompromisingly with the prospect of bad reviews. His company has a five-star rating on Google, but maintaining that rating wasn’t as simple as providing good service and waiting for positive reviews to come in. For the past five years, Levy has taken a proactive approach that relies on automating the emails clients receive after each class. These emails encourage users to leave positive reviews, yes, but they also suggest that customers should contact you directly with any critical feedback. “I think I’m playing defense against a poor review before can happen, it’s as valuable as the five-star review itself,” says Levy. This strategy opened up an avenue of communication with customers who might otherwise take their complaints directly to reviews on Google or Yelp.
Still, Levy had to deal with the worst of the worst: a one-star review. “It immediately ruined my day,” Levy says of the dispute, which involved a customer trying to reap the benefits of an activity package that had been expired for years. In moments like these, your instinctive response could also be to react immediately, but Kurlychek says it’s higher to stay calm and composed so that your emotions don’t influence your response. “Never get defensive,” Kurlychek says. “It’s fine to answer based on facts, but be polite and remember that the customer is always right.” That’s exactly what Levy did. He connected with the customer on the phone to make sure the caller’s tone was not misread. He didn’t directly ask the customer to remove the review, but because he showed such real interest in resolving the issue, the customer deleted it himself after a phone call.
Similarly, Brian Mosko from Cured and wheyA specialty food market in Las Vegas that boasts an average rating of 4.9 stars believes that relying on bad reviews is the best way to minimize damage. “Everyone accepts five stars with a certain amount of skepticism, but [prospective customers] look at your one-, two- and three-star reviews and see how the company handles it,” says Mosko.[Does the business owner] attack that person and blame them? Or is there a thoughtful answer that goes some way to explaining the situation?”
Even if you do not get the same result as Levy did by voluntarily deleting a bad review, it can be a good habit to develop a good habit of responding to critical reviews with a compassionate comment. “Remember that anyone reading these reviews is probably a potential customer,” advises Kurlychek. “It will be much easier for them to put themselves in the shoes of a dissatisfied customer than a business owner. Propose a solution publicly. And put real effort into each answer.”