Compliments, Comments and Complaints
How online reviews, whether good or bad, make customers sit up and notice
Customers use reviews to help them find a business where they can find good-quality merchandise and fine service. They scour review sites like Yelp! and Angie’s List for establishments with many positive reviews. Once they find one with a long list of accolades, they go to that store to spare themselves from going to another shop and finding dissatisfactory service. People generally trust the word of other customers who visit your shop. The things said about your service will validate whether the claims you made (e.g. devotion to customer satisfaction) are actually true.
If you don’t have online reviews on independent assessment sites, customers might pass you over. People prefer tried-and-tested shops they could visit for the first time and find what they need. They think that they might be discontented if they dropped in a store that doesn’t offer any customer ratings on previous transactions. One way to prevent this from happening is to ask satisfied customers to write an online review for you. Once good reviews pile up, more new clients will come in to check out your products and services. This will expand your customer base and help you be more popular in the community.
Good reviews also have a way to increase your web presence. The higher the number of satisfied comments, the better your search engine ranking is. More and more clients will visit your website and enhance your social media campaigns. Strive to improve your online reputation now. This will largely help you in increasing your sales.
According to the infographic made by Demandforce.com, customers regard reliability as the most important characteristic. A reliable business provides more good value on products and services while expertise and professionalism follow behind. Good value means a balance between the superiority of your merchandise and its price. Is the cost reasonable and affordable? Other than that, you have to be knowledgeable and skilled in your industry to gain more customers. Professionalism is also important because if the people you deal with find you rude, plenty of bad reviews will appear under your name and location.
Bad reviews do not necessarily spell trouble for your online presence, as long as they are weighed down by a large number of good ones. They might be treated as isolated incidents that do not have bearing on the actual state of your products and services. Also, the way you approach negative feedback is very important. Reacting rudely will turn off your potential customers. Not reply at all is also be detrimental as the bad reviews may increase and drag down your online reputation. The best way to handle this problem is to reply back in a diplomatic manner, with the aim of appeasing dissatisfaction.
Why do customers write reviews anyway? Why do they post their reactions on the web? Here are the reasons:
One underlying reason customers love to create reviews is to tell other people about what they think of the service they got from the company. Not everyone is driven by getting freebies or special treatment. They write reviews because of an altruistic aspiration “to help other consumers make good decisions.” As long as the reviews are trustworthy and well-written, the general public will believe them. This is why it is important you read through all the comments to weed out reviews that may seem like spam, which are mainly comments made to discredit your business.
References: