Reviews are key and it can be a painful process if it’s a negative review on your business. The business owner has put so much work into training their staff. If something goes wrong it might not even be their fault. So, what we try to do is come in as a mediator and look at it from a purely non-emotional standpoint to see what truly happened. The first step is going back to the business owner. We support you, we’re on your side, we want you to do the right thing. However, we want to find out if there’s any truth because we also don’t want to bring fire and brimstone only to find out that we’re in the wrong. We want to understand what happened from a third-party standpoint and then see how we can tell the business owner to respond.
What’s a typical problem with Negative reviews?
Not being able to find the customer in your database is a problem that happens a lot. We’ve battled over the years with reviewers on Google having the name ‘Chanel’ or ‘Coco Chanel’ [vanity display name]. How are you supposed to track that person back into your customer database? A lot of our clients use third-party systems like ServiceTitan and CRMs to handle their client database, but if the user poses as ‘Coco Chanel’ on Google, you’re probably not going to find that person in your database.
How should a business owner handle a Negative review?
The best thing a business owner can do when coming back and responding to a negative review is to just be open with the customer and try to get it offline as quickly as possible. So be open, be ready to meet in the middle on it but also get that dialog offline. Show that you’re available by offering your cell phone number or your service manager’s cell phone number and try to get in front of the person in order to resolve the issue.
What’s the importance of a third-party company when handling Negative reviews?
It’s extremely important to have a third-party company help you with reviews because we’re able to see a lot of other reviews come in from different parts of the country and understand what works for certain companies and industries. So again, I think we also help take the emotion out of it. Most businesses don’t have time to do all this background research about a person. We like to see if the person has a history of posting negative reviews and then we can tailor a response with the business owner in the right way.
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