Successful Internet Tools

If you read my last post, A Framework for Negative Reviews, you have a tool for effectively turning negative customer reviews into golden opportunities for your online reputation, making lemonade out of lemons! In this post, I will provide a detailed process for dealing with negative reviews to help move you to the top of the local search maps. Enjoy and prosper.

Sorting Your Negative Reviews

“A rose is a rose is a rose.” Not so with negative customer reviews. Some negative reviews can improve your business reputation; others will hurt it. Some reviews call for a response; others don’t. Sorting out the differences between these reviews is the first step in the process.

Here’s a simple sorting system you can use. You may wish to add additional sorting criteria that fit your business.

You goofed up! You have a bad product for the customer situation. You made promises you did not keep. You missed an appointment. The customer feels wronged. Respond.

The facts are wrong. Misunderstandings can arise about the product or your business. You feel that with the right information, the customer would feel differently. Respond.

A bad review sparks a wild fire. One negative review gets piled on by others. The negativity is spreading across social media channels with Tweets and Facebook comments. You cannot afford to have this wild fire destroy your business reputation. Respond quickly.

Customer is having a “bad hair day.” Some people have a negative bent about life. If you think this is the situation, don’t go to war over it. It’s a war you will never win. Let it go.

Someone has faked a bad review. Competitors in some industries are known for writing false and negative reviews about their competition. Make sure it is a legitimate review. Verify.

Key Ingredients for Responding to a Negative Review

Address the negative review quickly and in real time

The longer a customer broods about their negative situation, the bigger the problem becomes and the more difficult to resolve. Respond in real time using the same social media channels where the negative review was found. Customers and potential customer will use “time” as an indicator about your level of concern for the issue.

Make Contact with the customer

You can do this online, on the phone or with email.

Remain Calm and Thank the Customer

No business likes to be criticized. Charging wildly into the situation will not help resolve the issue. When others see you being defensive online, they will think less of your business. It’s always good to start by thanking the customer for the negative review.

Listen

The best starting point is always to have the customer articulate their issue. Ask questions to further understand the issue. Listen to the answers. Listen to what is not being said. Sometime, just being a good listener goes a long way to resolving the issue. Make sure the customer knows you care about them by the way you listen.

Be Honest

If you have made a mistake, admit it. Don’t make excuses. Explore ways to resolve the issue that works for you and the customer.

Be a real person

Identify yourself as the owner of the business. People feel good about dealing with the “boss.” Too many companies hide behind business policies. Or they come across as being very “official”. Right or wrong, the customer feels wronged. Speak to them in words that come from a real person and not a policy or business procedure.

Fix the Problem

Offer to fix the problem. Your job is to make the situation better and to satisfy the customer. Your ability to do this will determine whether a negative review becomes a positive for your business.  Give the customer an outlet for resolving the issue.

Promise to do better

Some situations may not have a perfect solution. It’s important that you promise to do better in the future. Potential customers will see your promise online.

Go the extra mile

By going the extra mile for the customer you show a commitment to having them as a long time customer. Others who see this online will be impressed with your commitment towards customers. Resolving negative customer reviews is now part of your customer service program.

Example of Negative Review Resolution

Here’s an example on how one business dealt with negative customer review.

On a Saturday afternoon in March, Precision Door of NJ got a scathing review from a very unhappy customer. The next day this unhappy customer received a telephone call from the Owner.
The owner thanked the customer for taking the time to submit a review of his business on Google. He let the customer know that he took reviews seriously and that he appreciated the review because it gave him the chance to fix the problem. He also used the time to understand the customer’s problem and see if he could rectify it.
It turns out the customer had a legitimate gripe. A couple of things had gone wrong on the call, and on top of it the customer was charged for something he probably shouldn’t have been.
Doug was able to use this opportunity to refund the customer’s money. And as importantly, he was able to get additional training to an employee he wouldn’t have otherwise known needed it.
Although the customer still wasn’t thrilled he went back to Google and posted another review of the business – A 3-Star Review.
Tim Coleman

Conclusion

Now you have information on when and how to respond to negative customer reviews. In the next post, I will provide some tools you can use for this process. I want to thank a number of authors for their input to this subject. I took bits and pieces from each of them. Click on their names if you want to see more of their information.

• DIANE CHARTO
• Erin Mulligan Nelson
• Yvonne Gaudette
• Danika Atkins
• Jason Keith
• Matthew Hunt 
• LISA BARONE
• SEO Igloo Blog
• Jay Baer 
• Chris Book

Share your questions and comments in the Reply Section below.  Thank you.

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You weighted the pluses and minuses of using a third party to do your customer review process. You’ve decided it’s a good business decision to use a third party. What are your options? In this post, I will explore five options for using third parties to do customer reviews that can help move you to the top of the local search maps.

Maven Reviewers

There are reviewers who do multiple reviews on the internet. These are called Maven Reviewers. There are signs that Google gives more weight to these reviewers. Here an excerpt from one study on Maven Reviewers.

If I were Google, what would I look for in a review? I couldn’t filter bad reviews and just show positive ones, obviously. No, I would want reviews from mavens. People who love to shop and give their well informed opinions. What would these people have in common? They would have a lot of reviews to their credit. So, I would look for reviewers with a large number of reviews to their credit.

To look for more evidence, I went across country and found a florist in NY with only 6 reviews but the stars were given. When I dug into the reviews a little further, I saw that they were provided by reviewers with the following number of reviews to their credit: 83, 31, 69, 19, 55. Much more “mavenesque”  http://www.convertoffline.com/is-google-filtering-reviews-or-reviewers/.

How do you find Maven Reviewers?  You can go to a site like Yelp which specializes in customer reviews. Find those reviewers in your business category that have made many reviews.  Become friends with them and ask them to review your business.   You can use a Google search for them.  Many of the third party vendors who do customer review process are seen as Maven Reviewers because of the number of reviews they make.

Third Party Providers for Customer Reviews

You can hire companies to do your online customer service reviews. Here’s how one business describes their work. I share with you this company not as endorsement. Rather to show you the types of services a third party provider can do for your customer review process.

Recommendations from like-minded buyers build shoppers’ confidence. PowerReviews accelerates content creation, moderation, and distribution using research-proven processes, product-specific templates, and structured reviews that focus on shopper interests.

Help shoppers make better decisions. PowerReviews structured reviews present the information that matters most to consumers, summarized in easy-to-ingest formats. PowerReviews’ structured write-a-review process and Review Accelerator generate the critical mass of content needed to power meaningful social programs.

Executive dashboards and product-level analytics help you measure social programs, track trends in customer behavior, and refine your operations for maximum impact. Only PowerReviews’ Open Social Commerce Network puts you in complete control of your content, making it easy to share your user-generated to social networks and channel partners of your choosing. http://www.powerreviews.com/why-powerreviews.

Buy a Customer Review Process Form

If you want to make a small investment, one company has developed a Google Customer Review form that you can easily adapt for your business. This form can then be used as a handout for your customers to provide reviews on Google. 

Customer Review Forms

Again I have not used this product nor endorse it. I offer it to you as an option.

Hire Someone to Work in Your Store Doing Customer Reviews

One company hired a person to use a laptop computer within the store to produce customer reviews. Their job is to ask customers before leaving the store if they would provide a customer review for the store. If the customers consent, they are provided with a special gift. They log the person into a review site and let the person do the review privately.

Third Party Post Card Customer Review process.

Here’s an interesting twist on one third party will bring to the customer review process.

What we do is supply our clients with a 4 X 6 postcard that asks people to write a review about the business  from which they just received products and/or services from.  Our clients make sure they put a pre-paid postage stamp on the postcard and ask the customer for a review after services have been rendered.  They let the customer know they use a third-party service to learn how they can improve their services and it would be really helpful if the customer could take 60 seconds to leave an anonymous review on the postcard and stick it in the mailbox.

NOTE: Don’t forget to add a disclaimer on the postcard that notifies your customers that the review may be used for marketing purposes or posted online.

Well, the postcard comes to our P.O. Box and we have our team post that review online with one of our many maven reviewer profiles for that anonymous reviewer. We add the review to Google Places or to some of the other major authority review sites that Google tends to pull data from.

We allow for each of our clients to get between 4-7 reviews a month (depending what is normal amount of reviews to get for their particular local niche): any more (in our opinion) would be unnatural. If our clients use this to its maximum benefit that is 40-70 reviews every year.  Now that is what you call actively managing your brand and online reviews.  It’s one of the best ways to drive traffic and help convert online searchers into offline buyers.  Small Business Online Coach.

Conclusion

If you are unable to do customer reviews and you still want the advantage it gives your business on getting to the top of the local search maps, then outsource or use third parties to do this function. You can gain better reviews, more credibility, and you will save time.

What are your comments and questions about using third party reviewers?  Share them in the Reply Section below.  Thank you.

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You’ve decided that using a third party is the best way for your business to get online customer reviews.  What are your options?  In this video post, I will show you five ways you can use third parties to get customer reviews that move your business to the top of the local search  map.  Enjoy and prosper.

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