The internet has given your customers a powerful platform to sing praises or criticise your business. With a wide variety of review platforms available that cover business in general to the industry specific platforms (like Zomato, formerly UrbanSpoon). Keeping up with who is saying what where is becoming increasingly difficult.

Why should I care about online reviews?

If you had a disgruntled customer standing out the front of your store telling everyone who walked in about that one time that their food was an hour late, or the price was too high or the service was bad you would probably try to resolve the issue and move them along.

Instead of a disgruntled customer outside your door, you have a review attached to your business name that appears any time a prospective customer looks you up online. How you deal with any negative reviews is incredibly important as your reply is also publicly visible.

It is not all negative though! It is also great to monitor positive reviews and respond with thanks. Building up this positive feedback also gives you insight as to what makes your customers happy so that you can work to improve your business even further.

Why are reviews important?

As people become more and more familiar with technology there is an increase in the amount of research an average customer will do before choosing a particular company. If you type your business name into Google you will see a number of results from different platforms (as well as your own website) that have information on your business as well as reviews.

Pretend that you are a customer and you have just searched for two restaurants (or mechanics or dentists or …), one has 143 reviews with an average rating of 4/5 stars. The second has 3 reviews with an average rating of 1.5/5 stars and a lengthy description of a negative experience.

Which business would you choose?

I have no negative reviews, why should I care about reviews?

Fantastic work! but it is a bit too soon to pat yourself on the back. Whilst having no negative reviews is wonderful, you are only one poor experience away from your first one. In order to minimise the damage a negative review can have on your online presence you need to be pushing happy customers to review you on whichever platforms you think are best (Facebook is a popular choice as it is widely used).

How do I get reviews?

Just ask! You can ask your customers to leave you a review on any of the platforms that you wish to focus on. If you are interested in finding out more about which review platforms are the most suitable for your industry and would like a way to monitor these platforms easily please get in touch with us today!