Taking the Sting out of Reviews

There’s nothing worse than a bad review on Yelp or Trip Advisor to ruin your day. Once you get past the first stage of not taking it personally, you might still have to face the review lingering in a top position a month or even a year after. Good news! There are ways to make this work for you and improve the quality of your life! Customer reviews are certainly not new to business, but with the rise of social media they are more of a driving force to the bottom line than ever. Online Reputation Management, or ORM for short, is the latest offspring in the social media family. Should you be concerned about your reviews? Absolutely! An infographic titled The Review of the Reviews from People Claim, an online dispute resolution company, shows that 82% of consumers considered user generated reviews valuable. Other statistics include: 75% of reviews posted on review websites are positive. 95% of unhappy customers will return to your business if an issue is resolved quickly and efficiently. 71% agree that consumer reviews make them more comfortable that they are buying the right product/service 70% of people consult reviews/ratings before purchasing. People are 63% more likely to purchase a product from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. Customer reviews create a 74% increase in product conversion Do you need to hire an ORM company? If you’re a small business, probably not. But you should take charge and claim your listing on a few key review sites. These include: Yelp - brick & mortar, restaurants, retail Foursquare - same Open Table - restaurants Urban Spoon - restaurants Trip Advisor - lodging Angie’s List - services Facebook - everyone Google+ - everyone Better Business Bureau - everyone LinkedIn - job seekers/hiring for recommendations Consumer Reports - products Once your account is set up, on most sites you can contact the reviewer directly. This is like using the “Easy button” for addressing complaints. And yes, you need to address the complaints. On the plus side, if the review is positive, you can thank them too. Other ways to find out where you stand online that are free are Google alerts and Mention. These services will alert you via email when your name comes up online. You set the parameters on content and how often you want to be contacted, so you won’t have to be hit first thing on a Monday morning if that doesn’t work for you. One way to keep the bad news out of site is to keep the reviews coming. Encourage your customers and fans to sing your praises online. There are many ways to accomplish this: Keep an iPad or tablet at the cash register for immediate review action Have a sign at the cash register as a reminder Use the window stickers provided by key review sites. Trip Advisor and Yelp are big on this. Ask your customers directly. If they send you an email, you can put it on your website. Even a Facebook or Foursquare check-in is a review of sorts - it shows they like you enough to visit. But perhaps the most important thing is to keep the reviews authentic. Morals and ethics aside, as a business you can get fined, sued, and pretty much lose all credibility if you’re caught with fake reviews. So keep promoting the real ones. If you keep it a numbers game, the more you have coming in, the less likely the bad one will affect you, both personally and professionally.