Reputation Management – 3d render concept with blue and white arrows flying over a white background.Have you been asked yet? In the past
couple of years you have probably been asked to do this. If you remember the
experience at all you might take a second to do it. If you don’t, if it’s too
complicated or too involved or takes too long then that’s a definite NO. If
everything went without incident then you probably did not. If there was a
problem then it’s likely you did. We are, of course, talking about reviews and
surveys about your experience with a company, particular product or service.
How you answered these questions, if you were thinking like an average person
who didn’t own a business, is likely in line with how most people feel or react
to these opportunities.
If you own, or manage, a business
which could benefit from reviews and testimonials then your perspective likely
changes. Maybe you are more sympathetic to participating. Maybe you will leave
a negative review if something wasn’t right, but not too negative, as you are
trying to help a fellow. You might even leave a positive review if you had a
good experience because you hope someone would do that for you. To react in
these ways to another business trying to gauge your experience with them puts
you in a similar position to many business owners or managers. Elsewhere in our
site we quote a study from Forbes Magazine and TripAdvisorwhich
found that 97% of business owners thought online reputation is
important, 98% of business owners feel that online reviews are important
to their success, and 92% of them felt that a social media presence is a
key to success
If you are still not convinced that
customer ratings and reviews are important, remember the last time you traveled
to an unfamiliar location and looked up a restaurant or hotel or attraction.
It’s very likely you paid some attention to what was said about the places in
question. Also, it may be less likely but still very possible that something
negative that someone posted somewhere about your business made its way back to
you for reasons that may or may not be fair. To get the praise of positive reviews
you have to deal with the sting of negative reviews, even though they may have
not interacted with your business enough to justify the rating a customer gave.
Chances are you have been involved in one or both of these scenarios so we can
conclude that customer ratings and reviews are important to your business, or
should be.
It’s probably safe to say that we’ve
established the importance of customer ratings and reviews, but is there a way
to only capture good reviews and forget the bad ones. A true customer
experience meter should be unbiased and doing this means making means available
to leave positive and negative reviews. Unfortunately the common tendency among
anyone who might leave a rating or review is to leave far more negative reviews
than positive ones. Further, if a review or rating process takes too much time,
is too hard to find, or is confusing then people won’t bother. No amount of
giveaway incentives can overcome a difficult process used to capture customer
feedback, and to encourage ratings with a give way risks tainting the reviews
you get.
What’s a business to do? Larger
businesses, if they solicit reviews at all, can absorb negative ratings but too
often any constructive feedback is lost in the shear shuffle and size of that
business. For smaller companies whose focus is more local, just a few negative
reviews can be devastating to customer traffic or interactions. After some
research and much thought, we at JKL Works have come up with a three-step
process to get positive ratings and reviews from your current customers to help
get new customers and keep everyone satisfied so your business will grow and
prosper.
- Be Positively Obsessed With Your Customers’ Experience
- Actively Solicit Ratings or Reviews
- Actively Respond to Ratings and Reviews
Be Positively Obsessed with Your
Customers’ Experience: This
concept on some level should seem obvious to any business owner or manager. We
give customers what they seek because we can provide that particular product or
service. This is certainly a necessity for small businesses to survive, but how
many of us truly take a longer than normal amount of time to think about or
create the right customer experience. While it’s true that you can spend too
much time dwelling on, but not implementing, what a great customer experience
with your business can look like, most companies are more focused on what they
offer than how they offer it. Spend some real time thinking about not only how
every customer interaction should go, but how your business can leave a positive
impression every time with as many customers as you can so they return again
and again. Seek advice on this from trusted advisors but also discuss this with
any employees you have or any customers with whom you have a strong
relationship so they give you that trusted feedback.
Jim, Mattress Mac” MacingvaleThe goal then is to set a game plan
about how every interaction is supposed to go and work toward making that
happen…every time no matter what. Of course every interaction should go well and
all customers should be happy, so how do you stand out in that crowd in behalf
of your company? A growing number of our clients focus on
“transparency” with no hidden fees or bait and switch tactics. Those
in the Houston area know about Jim
“Mattress Mac” Macingvale who started in 1981 with a small,
dumpy, furniture store in portable buildings in North Houston which has grown
to a multi-store regional empire that even includes its own furniture
manufacturer. He did this by focusing on how he wanted the customer experience
from the beginning, and he hasn’t wavered. If you need many examples of what a
customer-experience-focused business looks like, you should also consider
reading Michael Gerber’s book The
E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What To Do About It.
This book teaches you to develop repeatable systems requiring the least amount
of skill for each position. This is a must-read around JKL Works for lots of
reasons, but in setting up these systems businesses create some truly unique,
unforgettable and successful small business customer experiences because
owners, managers and entrepreneurs made the choice to put the customer
experience first and put the systems in place to make it a reality. We found a great video that explains how this works.
For this to be successful, you have to make the choice to perfect that customer
experience first and foremost.
Actively Solicit Ratings or Reviews:
Next, you must adopt the posture
that you and your business are open to, and encourage in every reasonable way,
feedback, ratings and reviews. Yes you may get all kinds of feedback from the
positive to the negative to the downright silly, but they all have to matter.
If you have been working on your customer experience then this might be easier
than you realize, but some people are uncomfortable putting themselves or their
business out there for customer or public scrutiny. Customers like to feel
appreciated whether they deserve that appreciation or not due to bad behavior
or are always a joy to see come in the door. A friend, colleague and teacher
once quoted something he learned at a sales seminar that “everyone needs
to be treated as though they have a sign around their neck that reads make
me feel important“. Getting feedback and reviews from your customers,
especially in a small business, brings this home and truly helps them to feel
that importance.
Do ratings work? Ask Tesla or
Uber in recent years. Both have revolutionized their respective
industries and both have taken some serious body shots for faulty equipment (in
the case of Tesla’s batteries causing fires) or faulty processes (Uber’s driver
screening issues with some horror stories). Yet both of these companies are
able to weather these storms because they get good reviews too. People love
these companies and they build loyalty despite their mistakes because they
focus on customer experiences and, especially in Uber’s case, ratings as a core
part of their business models.
Actively Respond to Ratings and
Reviews: So your company may have a great
customer experience, and you may give customers every chance to rate or review
your products, services or operations, but if you don’t respond either way then
these efforts may not matter. You should have a system in place not only to get
those ratings or reviews but to act on them. This means posting good reviews in
places where they can have the most impact. It also means responding to
negative reviews quickly to take advantage of the chance you may have to turn
that experience around in your favor. For negative reviews though, it’s also
important to give them a way to bypass you if the experience was that bad to
have their complaints heard. Purposely stifling bad reviews, called
“review-gating”, doesn’t make things better. In fact it can make them
worse if the knowledge that you control reviews leaked out. This then taints
your results and your company may not recover. On the other hand, responding
quickly to negative feedback is an opportunity for you to turn something
negative into something positive and perhaps even regain a customer who just
had something go wrong that you then made right for them in a way which works
for both of you.
If you have made the choice for your
business to maximize your customers’ experience and to make actively soliciting
ratings into an important part of that experience, there are some tools which
can help. In terms of where to put ratings, there are many sites from social
media to yellow pages to specialty search sites for your business type which
can all enhance your company’s online presence. We have found Google and
Facebook, in that order, are the best places to both encourage reviews
and to interact with them. If you have claimed your Google My Business page
then here is how to set up your own review web address you can share
with people. Depending on your business needs, other sites like Facebook, Yelp,
YP.com, Foursquare, Angie’s List or Homeadvisor have their own systems so you
can set up a listing and encourage reviews. What if there was a way to
encourage reviews, accelerate positive reviews quickly to Google and anywhere
else you wish, respond to negative ratings before they went out, and a way for
horrible experiences to pass through ungated?
So many review site choices
Even though you are welcome to go to
Google plus any of the niche sites listed above and set up their review system,
we have come up with a faster way which can accelerate your customer experience
efforts and we’re one of the few In the country with access to it. We have a
service called TruReview which is
a closed system which solicits reviews from your contact list or your web site,
social media page, or other means. Once reviews come in, you can se the
positive ones to show links to post their experience on Google, Facebook, or a
host of other sites. As we said above, you still have to deal with negative
reviews and any that come through this system are asked to give their contact
information so you as the business owner can reach out and try to remedy a bad
experience. Also true to an impartial, ungated, review system the customer is
shown a way to place their negative review out there without interference whether
they provide contact information or not.
So good reviews are posted where you
want them to make the most impact immediately. Bad reviews are a second chance
for you to turn a situation around before it gets out of control. We are
pleased to offer this TruReview service for the starting price of $249.99
a month for life. This offer expires in a couple of months at the end of
the year so act now. Call us at 713-588-5498
or e-mail us. Whether you take advantage
of our offer or not, making Reputation Management services a part of your
business life is now a necessity to avoid getting negative reviews for something
you didn’t do and may not even know about. Take advantage of one of the free
offers or our exclusive TruReview system for the safety and health of
your business.
