When I first started managing online reputations for businesses, I had no idea that there were things every business should be doing to manage the conversations that were taking place about their businesses online. I was surprised to find that even though sites like Yelp, Google+ Places, Foursquare, and Yahoo Local were designed to give consumers a voice, that they also give business owners a powerful means of showing the best (or worst) of their customer service abilities.
Before the rise of review websites, if consumers were unhappy with the service or product they received, they could go back to the business and complain. Sometimes this led to good customer service and sometimes not. Either way, that was just about the only recourse consumers had and some customers, either from bad experiences or from shyness or an overbearing sense of being polite, chose not to say anything when they were unhappy and just never used the same business again.
As business owners, it has always been in our best interests to provide excellent customer service and most of us do everything we can to ensure the customer leaves happy and ready to tell the world how fantastic our business really is. So, it hurts when we see a negative review posted on Yelp, Google, or any other publicly view-able site.
That's where we have a choice - we can turn the other cheek, ignore what is being said OR we can enter the conversation and use that feedback to strengthen our businesses and improve customer relations. After all, we cannot effectively improve our companies if we don't know there are problems to be addressed!
The different review sites are set up so that business owners can "claim" the pages that have been created specifically for their businesses. Once you go through this process, you can update your information there, post pictures, add links to your website, and, most importantly, you can respond to people who have posted reviews for you!
For the first time, all those customers who left unhappy have a voice - and a very loud voice given the high number of people who use review sites to research businesses and products - but business owners also have an excellent tool to reach out and mend bridges. We can restore relationships with our clients and correct things we never knew were wrong.
It's been the best part of my job as an online reputation manager to see clients turn a one star rating to a five star rating as they entered the conversation and corrected errors with their clients. It can happen for your business too - are you ready to manage your online review websites?
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