Just who is Jessica K. and why should you care? Well if you are the Garden Fever Garden Center you’d be happy to know that she just posted a 5 star review on Yelp. Awesome, but read further down on the reviews and you’ll find Leah L. who wasn’t exactly thrilled. She felt ignored on her visits. While you might not be aware of search and review sites like Yelp, CitySearch, or Foursquare, your customers are. This Garden Center had a 4 star average on 15 reviews.
At the time of this post the Yelp page for that garden center had not yet been claimed. In fact when we run research scans for local garden centers we find that only a small percentage have actually claimed their Yelp page, not to mention more common opportunities like a local.google, local.yahoo, or bing listing. One benefit of claiming your profile is the chance to respond to reviews – both positive and negative.
Statistics show that on average most reviews are four stars or higher. With that said human nature shows that most potential customers scroll down to see what that 1 star customer had to say. Yes, good reviews give us a glow, but bad reviews can send your business into a tail spin. But before you bust out in a class A rant, you need to count to ten and consider these simple tips to handling bad reviews.
1) Be aware. First things first, you need to know what your customers are saying about you. So the first order of business is to focus on the most commonly used search and review sites like those listed earlier in this post. Next, and most importantly, read them and read them often.
2) Be patient. While the natural inclination might be to respond with some form of anger, frustration, or screaming at staff, you need to sleep on it. Let’s face it, nobody likes criticism, but the fact is it is out there. The important thing is to handle it professionally.
3) Be open. While it might not seem like it at the time you can learn a tremendous amount from your customer’s feedback. The irony of course is that more people are going to post on Yelp than fill out your ‘How are we doing?’ cards. So listen and learn. These reviews can be a key tool in improving your business.
4) Be responsive. So once you have slept on it, learned from it and addressed the issues in question, you need to respond to it. Try to resist the urge to be defensive. The best response is short, sweet and to the point. Thank them, confirm the problem and let them know what you are going to do about it. Next, invite them back and tell them to identify themselves to the manager. This can be done with a comp, personal greeting, or a do over.
5) Get better. Reviews, good or bad, are critically important to your business. So take them seriously, identify the problem and fix it. Once you have done that a few times you will probably realize you need to employ a system for regularly scanning sites for reviews on your business. That is another benefit of securing your business profile as you can then get automated e-mails that alert you when a post or review is made on your profile page.
At Sunrise Marketing we’ve helped many small business owners by monitoring and managing their online business reputation. Search and review reports are just one part of a larger program of SMO, or Social Media Optimization. While we may have focused on negative reviews, we can also take the positive reviews and post them on your Facebook page, tweet them on Twitter, publish them in an e-mail newsletter and add them to your website.
The important thing is to learn more about it. At Sunrise Marketing we can provide your business with a FREE snapshot analysis of your business. We’ll help identify ways for you and your business to make the most of social media marketing. Click here to arrange for a free analysis.
0 comments:
Post a Comment