Helping to improve your business or product reputation
Customer feedback is here to stay. Constructive criticism is often beneficial if the review response is handled well. However, negative reviews are when fake reviews are left, or an unhappy customer leaves a 1 star review, a 2 stars review, along with a negative comment that harms the business’s reputation.
Online reputation management aims to counter the situation using a positive review and regain the trust for a potential customer. It can be particularly damaging to a local business that might rely on new future customers.
There are a variety of sources of online customer reviews which can damage a business’s reputation. A single negative online review can turn a potential customer away before they even make contact.
Local businesses benefit significantly from traffic that comes from potential customers searching for your service on Google. Online customer reviews can paint a superb picture, but all too often only poor reviews are left, or fake reviews are placed.
Facebook has become a significant player in the market of online business but sadly fake reviews exist on this platform too. In addition, an unhappy customer can exaggerate or cause ongoing difficulties if their customer complaint is not handled to their satisfaction.
Review sites like Yelp and Trustpilot can provide consumers with an impression of positive customer satisfaction from happy customers and improve the trust level when making a purchase. However, not all reviews are positive and the negative ones can start to damage the reputation of the business online.
Within the online review market, these are the key types of negative reviews that exist.
There are fake reviews everywhere that aim to damage reputation. These negative online reviews create a feeling of uncertainty, even when the majority of real customers are happy resulting in lost sales.
When a dissatisfied customer doesn’t believe they have been handled currently, or the outcome isn’t what they were hoping for, a war of words can happen, with the unhappy customer leaving negative reviews in a variety of places.
Genuine customer feedback should typically be handled sensitively and seen as positive feedback for the business. Future customers will want to see that a business learns from its mistakes.
Sometimes a negative reviewer just turns up and you’re unsure whether this is fake, or a disgruntled ex-employee, someone who had a bad experience, or another business owner with a competing product.
It’s essential today to have a review management strategy. This strategy will ensure that customer service within your business understand how to handle genuine customer feedback, while allowing each bad online review to be challenged.
The single most effective way to handle negative feedback is to drown it out with positive a significant number of positive customer reviews. It can be upsetting to think that someone disliked your product or service, but everyone gets bad reviews and customers understand that.
Nearly all businesses receive fake reviews that aim to harm the reputation with a potential client or customer. These can often be successfully challenged and removed.
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