While having good customer service has always been a key to having a successful business, today, it’s more important than ever!
What does your business look like online?
Have you ever looked up your business on a search engine? What comes up? Hopefully, you’ll see a link to your website. (You do have a website, right?)
And maybe you’ll even see some good reviews about your company right there towards the top of the search results.
What nobody wants to see are bad reviews for their business, even though it’s likely to happen now and then. In this Internet-dominated age, however, customers like to share their experiences with the companies with which they do business ”” especially in extreme circumstances, either when they’re really happy with a company, or when they’re really frustrated.
Word-of-mouth advertising is happening on a much broader scale than ever before now that folks often rely on social media and the Internet to get recommendations for anything and everything.
The importance of your presence online
If you already have a positive online reputation, that’s great! You’ve got this thing figured out! (Or at least it looks like you do… keep up the good work!)
If you don’t have much of a presence in the search engines, or if your online reputation is not what it should be, take heart! There are things you can do to change course.
Yes, there are agencies out there that specialize in helping companies “build” or “repair” their online reputations with fake reviews, but real potential clients can see right through that! This is not the path you want to take.
If you have no reviews, that’s better than having bad reviews. Skip right down to the section below about getting customers to leave feedback.
What can you do about negative feedback?
If you have bad reviews, the best course of action you need to take right now if you want to ensure a positive image online is to take an objective look at your own business. Are you offering top quality products and/or services and making sure customer service is a priority? If so, then you will have happy customers, but you might need to go the extra mile to get your happy customers to leave feedback. If you think there are areas where you could possibly improve, that’s great! Then you can come up with a strategy to right the ship, so-to-speak.
First, let’s deal with the bad or lackluster reviews: Bill Gates says, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Approach dealing with your poor reviews with that attitude, and you’ll be well on your way to achieving success.
The experts often recommend that if you receive a bad review online, it might be a good idea to reply gracefully to the comment. Apologize, if necessary (or appropriate), and if there’s some way you can make things right for that customer, offer that. What do you have to lose? If the disgruntled customer is still unhappy, at least you will have made a visible effort to the public reading your reviews that you do care about your customers and you want to make them happy. There are circumstances where reviewers might decide to pile on and criticize a business for some reason other than a genuine customer satisfaction issue. Most business owners would likely be able to discern the difference between those kinds of hostile reviews and reviews from sincere (but unhappy) customers that genuinely merit a response.
Recommended Resource: 10 Ideas of How to Turn Negative Reviews Around (from SearchEngineLand)
Getting the good reviews
Once you’ve got happy customers, you’ll need to harness their excitement by getting them to leave you positive reviews and put those good reviews to work in letting others know what they can expect if they do business with you.
Make sure that the end product you’re delivering to your customers ”” whether it’s new construction, or a repair or remodel, is something they’re happy with. If they’re not, find out what you can do to make things right. When you make a genuine effort to understand exactly what your customers want, and then you make it your priority to make that happen, they’ll appreciate it and they’ll recommend you to others.
Here are some suggestions for making sure those happy customers leave positive feedback:
- If customers come to your place of business, you can have a computer or tablet set up where they can leave positive reviews before they leave.
- If you conduct business with your customers via email, send them a thank you message and let them know how much it would mean if they would write a positive review.
- You can also send customers a handwritten note or postcard with a link to a page on your website where they can click to visit the various sites and leave their reviews.
- Make sure you provide the links directly to your customers somehow.
How to create links for…
- Google Reviews
- Facebook Reviews
- Yelp Reviews – Find your business on Yelp and click “Write a Review” to find your review page.
- Angie’s List – You’ll need to log in to your Business Center account to get the link for leaving reviews.
And here’s a Pro Tip from our website developer, create shortened URLs for your Review links and it will not only allow you to keep a neat, handy list that you can copy and paste into emails (or on your website), but it will also allow you to track the clicks of those links to see if your customers are following through. Two good URL-shortening services are bit.ly and goo.gl. It’s super easy! Just go to one of those services, paste your link into the empty box and it will automatically create a short link. With bit.ly you can customize your links, so if you have a Google Reviews link and your business is called Henry’s Helpful Handyman service, you might shorten your bit.ly link and then customize it to something like bit.ly/Henry-Google-Reviews.
The most important takeaway from all of this?
Take care of your customers and you will enjoy smooth sailing.