Bad Reviews Kill: How to Manage Your Online Reputation

When you ask any business owner that has been around for decades how they have been successful they will always answer the same thing.  “People know who we are, we have a reputation in our community/industry. Most of our customers are either repeat customers or hear about us through word of mouth.” Through years of being in business and providing excellent service these companies have been able to establish a base of loyal customers.
No matter who you are or what your industry is, your reputation matters. People will always talk about you, both positively and negatively. Huge ad spends can try and control the conversation but it all starts with providing an excellent customer experience. Fortunately, businesses don’t need to spend millions of dollars in order to build a reputation online. The internet has allowed humans to communicate with each other faster than ever before and word of your business can spread rapidly. Here’s what you need to do to build your reputation and your business in no time.

Focus on happy customers

First things first, your reputation starts with your own actions. Make sure you don’t give your customers a reason to talk negatively about you both online and through word of mouth. You can’t build up a positive reputation without doing business ethically. Focus on your customers and not your shareholders. Do not use gimmicks, bait and switch tactics, and other schemes in order to make a quick buck. While it might make you a few extra dollars in the short term there is no way this will equate to a profitable long term strategy. Focus on every aspect of the customer experience. Make sure people that don’t buy from you still hold you in a positive light so they come back to you when their situation changes. Don’t neglect people the second after they give you their credit card. While it is impossible to make everyone happy all of the time the goal here is to make sure everyone leaves you feeling good about their experience.

Exceed customer expectations

After a customer has interacted with you there are many possible outcomes for what happens next. The two things you need to focus on while building your reputation are getting happy customers to talk about you and minimizing the impact of the (hopefully) few times customers are unhappy. Unfortunately, human tendency is just the opposite. People have come to expect a certain level of service and convenience at all times and people only notice when something doesn’t meet their expectations or far exceeds the level of service they were expecting.
If you booked a hotel room for one night and when you checked in the room was clean and the TV worked fine you would likely just drop your suitcase, go about your visit and check out the next day without thinking about it. However, if when you checked in the toilet didn’t flush and when you called the front desk no one came to fix it you would likely tell everyone you know never to go to that hotel. This can be a huge problem for you because while you likely had hundreds of other guests that night who had a positive experience, one customer is actively harming your reputation.
How you respond to situations like these is crucial to your business. If you can resolve a customer complaint with a solution that exceeds their expectations they will be more likely to talk about you in a positive light. Let’s say that same customer calls you to tell you that the toilet wasn’t working and you apologize and offer to upgrade them to a better room type and take a portion off their bill, exceeding their expectations. Now when they talk about their trip they will say, “The staff was so friendly and when something was wrong with my room they made it right and I got a free upgrade. I would definitely stay there again!”. Now this customer is more likely to come back to you and you have someone who is now advocating for your brand which is invaluable.

Give happy customers an arena to talk about you online

As you conduct business the right way and customers walk away happy you will naturally gain some traction through word of mouth. Take things to the next level by giving them places to talk about you online. This means claiming all your local listing accounts and social media accounts like Facebook. Doing this will give your customers a place to talk about you actively online and leave reviews while allowing you to see what is said about you.
Make sure you set up your Google places account for your business. Google plus and Google places are extremely important because the information in on your places page can show up alongside your business in search results. In fact over 43% of  Google searches have local intent so make sure you have your website, location, hours and phone number all listed. Reviews on Google are extremely valuable because they help both your search ranking as well as increase the amount of people that click on your result from the results page and once you get five reviews on your Google places page Google will add a star rating underneath your url in the search results.

Ask your existing happy customers to leave you a review online

As simple as this sounds so many people don’t follow through with this. The number one reason a salesman doesn’t make a sale is simply because they didn’t ask. The same thing goes for fostering reviews online. Even if you are small and just starting out chances are you still have customers that you have a close relationship with. Start by asking these people in person and following up with a personal email with instructions on how to leave a review. Many companies do not have any sort of local search engine optimization strategy, even those that have been around for years and have a solid social media fan base. For example, take a look here at the results that come up when I search for “Gym in Boston”.

First of all, the top of the results page is showing Google places and reviews above all other sites. Second, the top result is Equinox with only 6 reviews and a 3.8 star rating. The next two results only have 4 reviews so they do not have a star rating next to them. These are multi-million dollar companies that you could easily outrank just by asking 5 of your happiest customers to leave you a review online. Just make sure that you don’t incentivize or leave fake reviews on your review sites. In fact back in September 2013, 19 firms in New York were fined a total of $350,000 for leaving fake reviews online. If your business has a sales team try running a contest with a prize for the sales rep who gets the most positive reviews mentioning them by name. This will not only help your business but your sales rep as well as they will slowly start to have customers coming in asking for them specifically, earning them more in commission.

Monitor what people are saying about you online

While by now you will be doing everything in your power to make sure that people are saying positive things about you both in person and online there will still be people that are not happy for one reason or another. Make sure that you take a strategy in place for dealing with these people. More and more people are reaching out to social media pages with questions and customer service issues. A post on your Facebook saying “I ordered this product 2 weeks ago and when it finally arrived it didn’t even work” can cost you a lot of business, especially if you don’t notice it is there for months on end. When people do say something negative about you make sure you reach out to them directly and try and resolve the issue. When you do resolve the issue make sure that you kindly ask them to remove their negative review or change it to a positive one.

Ask your customers for feedback before they go to the web

One major way to stop negative reviews about you from popping up online is asking them about their experience with you before they go to the web. Depending on your business this might mean a follow up phone call, an email or asking them before they leave your place of business in person. While a lot people won’t respond, the ones that were less than satisfied will. Most of the time people who have a bad experience just want to tell someone about it.
When you do get people telling you that they had a positive experience thank them for their business and ask them if they would be willing to quickly leave you a review online. At Trellis we have helped clients expedite this process by building custom email templates and pages dedicated to leaving feedback. By filtering those who had a positive experience and those who had a negative one we can be proactive about responding to unhappy customers before they go online and direct happy customers to your review pages and social media channels.
As you can see, building your business is about much more than just making the sale. Happy customers will talk positively about you, continue to buy from you, and give you referrals which in turn will lead to more happy customers.
90% of consumers use search engines when researching products or services in their local area. Contact the team here at Trellis for more information and advanced techniques on how to manage your reputation online.