There are a lot of online options now for people who want to talk about their experience – good or bad – with your business.
While the best thing you can do about the bad ones is to respond professionally and honestly to the feedback, there are also ways for you to leverage and encourage the good ones which can be a great means of free, positive publicity for you.
First of all, you want to make sure that you see them. With all the options out there for customers to praise and vent, monitoring sites individually can be very time consuming. To make it easier for you, use a tool like Google Alerts, which is free of charge, or subscribe to one of the services out there to monitor web activity that mentions your business.
Of course, angry or dissatisfied customers are more vocal and apt to jump on the web than the happy customers. What to do? First, respond politely, honestly, and professionally to the complaints. Maybe you can designate one person to handle this kind of feedback who can also do some trend-tracking for you. If you can respond directly to the customer via email, that may be best. But if your response will be seen publicly, choose your words and your approach carefully. This is a customer service opportunity for you to turn a negative into a positive – especially for the onlookers.
Positive feedback sometimes requires more encouragement – let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to just sit back with a smile on your face when you are content. You need to rally customers to use these sights to write about their positive experience with your business or staff. Sign up for one of the online services that automatically emails customers and ask them to write a review for you. Sometimes, a little prompting can go a long way to help build that cache of good feedback that acts as free advertising.
Promote those good reviews! Collect them and post them to your site, link from your site to review sites – but make people see them. Frank feedback from others is often a strong selling point for new clients or customers, so use this stuff to your advantage. Every little bit of advertising helps, so make sure to look for opportunities that will boost your online image.
-Don MacMelville
If you are interested in more SEO techniques or would like to hire us to manage your reputation online contact us at: sales@getfoundquick.com or call 857.526.0096.
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