Wednesday, March 21st, 2012 at 10:00 am ?
Why negative reviews may actually be a GOOD thing for your small business
Every business owner wants to read glowing online reviews about their business. After all, great online reviews are proven to have a positive effect on the company bottom line. However, a few less than perfect reviews may actually be a good thing for your business for the following reasons:
1. Believable - If you have 100% 5 stars rating all the time, it will actually have the opposite effect than you expected. Perfect customer reviews make your business sound too good to be true and raise alarm bells for online surfers. They will be suspicious about your reviews and will probably think you have paid people to post favorable reviews or even worse submitted them yourself. So have about 10-20% average to mildly negative reviews will actually make your business more believable as most people know that you cannot possibly make every customer happy 365 days a year. When people are deciding which business to choose based on customer reviews, they will choose one where a majority of the reviews are positive and not necessarily a business that has 100% positive ratings.
2. Public Relations - Negative reviews also give you as a small business owner an opportunity to demonstrate your public relation skills to an online crowd. If people can see that you responded to every negative review with a sincere, compassionate, objective and corrective attitude and approach, your business will actually be seen as more personal and involved. It shows you are willing to go out of your way to make your customers happy and are willing to resolve any problems. Any normal person knows an average business transaction will have its hiccups and it?s comforting to know if and when it happens, the business owner will be proactive to sort it out.
3. Improvement - Negative reviews also help you as a small business owner to get to know things about your company that you may have never gotten to know otherwise. If customers are getting poor treatment from your employees, substandard products and services- the only thing worse than them voicing their displeasure is them keeping silent about it. Without any form of feedback, you will be confused why your sales are declining because you don?t know the root causes. So see negative reviews as a way to improve your business in areas it is currently weak and that you were not aware about. This way you will actually be thanking those negative reviewers for highlighting the problems and contributing to your company success.
Filed under: Reputation Management
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