We’ve talked about the importance of stopping negative reviews before they happen. We’ve given you tips for replying to reviews when they come in from clients. We’ve even told you how important reviews are for your SEO! Today we want to talk about the importance of replying to reviews and more importantly, trying to turn negative reviews into positive reviews.
We’re always here to bring you important stats about reviews, and today we have a few more you should know about from our friends at Moz.
- 57 percent of consumers will only use a business if it has four or more stars — (BrightLocal)
- One study showed that ~1.5-star rating increase improved conversions from 10.4 percent to 12.8 percent, representing about 13,000 more leads for the brand. — (Location3)
- 73.8 percent of customers are either likely or extremely likely to continue doing business with a brand that resolves their complaints. — (GatherUp)
- A typical business only hears from four percent of its dissatisfied customers, meaning that the negative reviews you rectify for outspoken people could solve problems for silent ones. — (Ruby Newell-Lerner)
- 89 percent of consumers read businesses’ responses to reviews. — (BrightLocal)
Yep, 89% of consumers read businesses’ responses to reviews!
It’s not just responding to reviews that matters, it’s what you say. Remember that there is a difference in responding vs. reacting to reviews. In the moment, human nature will always cause us to want to react, but it’s better to respond. Take a moment to clear your mind, speak to all involved parties, and make sure you have all of your facts straight. Once you have a clear mind and some information, you’ll be able to articulate your thoughts much better.
Do whatever it takes to remedy the situation.
But it wasn’t our fault! There is no scoreboard in the real world, and potential new clients will not care about specifics, they will just see a bad review. When a bad review comes in, it’s important to reach out to the client outside of Google, apologize, and try to make amends. Most importantly, explain to them that mistakes happen and the negative review really affects the business. Moz has a great system for this!
1. Reach — the customer reaches out with their negative experience, often knowing that, in this day and age, powerful review platforms are a way to reach brands.
2. Remedy — Some type of fix occurs, whether this results from intervention on the part of the brand, a second positive experience outweighing an initial negative one, or the consumer self-correcting their own misunderstanding.
3. Restoration — The unhappy customer is restored to the business as a happy one, hopefully, ready to trust the brand for future transactions, and the reputation of the brand is restored by an edited review reflecting better satisfaction.
Key to review transformation:
- 70 percent mentioned poor service/rude service rectified by a second experience in which staff demonstrated caring.
- 64 percent mentioned the owner/manager/staff proactively, directly reached out to the customer with a remedy.
- 32 percent mentioned item replaced or job re-done for free.
- 20 percent mentioned customer decided to give a business a second chance on their own and was better-pleased by a second experience.
- 6 percent mentioned customer realized the fault for a misunderstanding was theirs.
Review management is an important component of your business.
Every day, thousands of people search for businesses like yours on the internet, and reviews are not only as important as your SEO but play a role in your search engine rankings. WhiskerCloud has a reputation management team that actively monitors our clients’ online listings and replies to all reviews. We work hard to turn every 3 or 4-star review into a five star by asking questions like, “How could we have made your visit better or worthy of five stars?” The interesting thing we’ve seen is how often people will just go back in and immediately change it to five stars just because we acknowledged them.
This is what a 20-day period of reviews looks like from our reputation management dashboard.
Just because the majority of reviews are 5-star doesn’t mean we shouldn’t follow up on all reviews. We hope you take the time to do the same. Remember that you do have the power to grow your business by turning a few negative reviews into positive ones every single month. We’re here to help if you have any questions at all!
