When you’re running a small business, you fight for every customer, client and sale. That’s why it’s frustrating whenever something unexpected throws a wrench in the works. One of those unexpected wrenches for many small businesses is online reviews.
Positive reviews can springboard your business toward success, while negative reviews can seriously poison the well. In the past, businesses could afford to ignore them. That’s not the case anymore. Understanding reviews and knowing how to use them to your advantage is often the difference between going big and going home.
How Good Reviews Influence Consumers
Online customer reviews are crucial to the health of a business and there are stats to prove it. Businesses can see revenue jump as much as 9% with each star increase in their rating. According to a 2017 BrightLocal survey, 49% of people will skip over businesses with anything lower than four stars, and 84% of people trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation. Clearly, positive reviews can be total game changers if you can make the most of them.
How Bad Reviews Influence Consumers
Just as positive reviews can fuel the fire, negative reviews can douse it. Bad reviews can damage brand loyalty, deter would-be customers and can make your company a laughingstock. Sometimes the damage is minor and can be overlooked. More and more frequently, though, a little vitriol from a customer in an online review can do a real number on your business.
Bad reviews tend to repel would-be customers and clients. After reading a single negative review, 22% of consumers will not spend money on that business. The number jumps to 59% after three negative reviews, and four or more negative reviews can deter a whopping 70% of potential customers.
The truth is that, as long as they don’t look fake or solicited, people trust online reviews. They put far more faith in their peers’ input than in marketing material for sure, with 68% of millennials trusting reviews most. Only 34% trust more traditional marketing methods, like TV ads. Ignoring this fact is only damaging your business.
How A Dearth Of Reviews Influence Customers
Unlike the justice system, our culture tends to have a “guilty until proven innocent” mentality. If you have no reviews, it can be worse than having bad ones. They say no news is good news, but the phrase was coined long before we had online reviews.
Of course, small businesses (especially new ones) are not exactly going to be swimming in good reviews Scrooge McDuck-style. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore this important part of your online presence. A lack of reviews is a problem for your company and it’s one that needs to be solved if you want your business to grow — which leads us to our next point ...
How To Get More Positive Reviews
You need to be collecting more reviews. This is hard, since leaving a review isn’t always easy. First of all, it’s an additional thing that needs to be done in the day, and most people don’t want to spend the time — that is, of course, unless they’re furious and they want the world to know. Odds are, you have a lot more satisfied customers that aren’t necessarily reflected in your Google and Amazon reviews.
The rub then, as they say, is tapping into all that positive experience and encouraging customers to add their feedback where people can see it.
The steps to take include:
1. Provide quality products and/or services so that your customers have something good to say.
2. Make the review process as easy as possible. The less painful the feedback process, the more likely the customer will be to leave their opinion.
3. Try to keep it personal. Have someone the customer actually interacted with (in person, over the phone or via chat) extend the invitation to provide feedback.
4. Use a variety of channels to collect feedback. More feedback means having a better idea of how well you are meeting their needs.
How To Deal With Negative Reviews
Negative reviews will come and honestly, you want them to. They help you know where you can improve. What’s important is that you find them (monitoring tools like Google Alerts and TweetDeck can notify you when your brand is mentioned online) and that you don’t ignore them. Everyone’s watching to see how you react to criticism, and silence means either disregard for the customer or cowardice.
It can be difficult to know exactly how to respond to a negative review. There are some guidelines you can follow to make it easier, though:
• Respond to negative reviews, but do so in a professional manner.
• Take full responsibility for the negative experience.
• Give a sincere apology.
• Attempt to rectify the problem, if possible.
• Never blame the customer.
• Let them know you care about them as a person, not just a source of revenue.
According to one survey, 78% of online reviewers said that seeing a business respond to reviews made them trust that business more. Even if you can’t persuade the original reviewer to come back, those who read it will see you as an organization that acts classy and professional.
So remember, online reviews can be a valuable asset even for small businesses. Don’t neglect them just because they’re not in your field of expertise. Spend some time managing your business’s professional brand and you will reap significant rewards.
