If you’re a small business owner, online reviews can be a blessing or a curse. They’re great when you’ve got enough reviews—and if they’re positive. But things can change fast. Just one negative review can cost a business up to 30 customers.
Managing all the reviews for your business can get cumbersome, too. There are at least 20 “major” review sites. And if you really dig, you’ll find there are actually over 200 review sites or ways to leave reviews.
This all sounds like a major headache, but once you know how to manage even a few reviews, you’ll have the fundamentals of how to manage hundreds of them. Here are a few ways to do that.
Reply to every review
Reply to the good reviews and the bad reviews—especially the bad reviews. Nearly one-third of consumers say they judge a business based on whether it replies to reviews or not. So if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, outsource the job to your savviest customer service representative, or possibly to a salesperson.
While the marketing department is often given the task of responding to online reviews, customer-facing staff tend to have a better sense of what to say. They often understand customer needs a bit better than marketers do. I don’t say that to knock marketing; it’s just that customer service and salespeople tend to spend more time with actual customers.
Listen to negative feedback carefully
Nobody likes getting a negative review—especially if it’s delivered in an angry, abusive tone. But there can be hidden treasures in those nasty words.
Read the nasty review, then sit back and cool off. If it takes you a full day or more to reply, that’s okay. While you’re cooling off, try to see where the customer might have a point.
If they’re complaining about slow service, is it possible there’s an hour or two every day when waits are indeed a little long? If they’re angry about product quality, are you feeling sensitive because you actually just made a change to the product?
Sometimes complaints come from oversize expectations, too. Maybe you need to do a better job positioning your business so people understand that your business is a no-frills burger joint, not a five-star restaurant, and customers should adjust their expectations accordingly.
Particularly look for trends in the complaints. If even two reviews cite the same issue, that’s not a coincidence—that’s something you need to work on.
Ask for reviews
If you can accumulate even a dozen reviews, you won’t be as vulnerable to that one rogue reviewer who seems set on destroying your business. But there is a right way and a wrong way to get reviews.
Here’s the wrong way:
A dentist offers patients a $50 credit if they leave a positive review. Unfortunately for the dentist, this is a really bad idea, for several reasons:
- Yelp expressly forbids paying or incentivizing people to leave positive reviews. Yelp actually asks people to report any activity like this. They have a team of people whose only job is to find paid review requests like this.
- Once people know you’re paying for positive reviews, any amount of trust you may have built with them is destroyed.
- Paying for reviews can turn on you. What if someone threatens to leave a negative review if they’re not paid?
- You are undermining the entire practice and purpose of online reviews. These incentivized review offers are ultimately just a way to game the system.
So what’s the right way to ask for reviews?
First, pick the right time to ask, like when a customer is particularly happy. Second, ask in a laid-back, no-pressure sort of way. Third, ask in a way that makes it very, very easy for the customer to follow through. You can do this by sending them an email asking for a review. There are services like Birdeye that let you automate these kinds of emails. Prices vary depending on the provider and the plan, but it’s possible to find a good solution for a couple hundred dollars a month.
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How to manage online reviews more easily
To better manage your online reviews, you could create a master list of every possible review site your company could be on, and then set a reminder to check each of those review sites every week or two. On some of the review sites, you can set your account to send you a notification any time a new review is posted.
That’s the low-tech way to manage online reviews; you can also get a little more high-tech. There are services that will automate some of this work for you. They automatically monitor any relevant review site, then gather all activity into a single dashboard view.
The prices for these services vary, as do the features. Depending on how sophisticated they are, they could be considered full-scale “monitoring services,” and are similar to listening stations some companies use to monitor what people are saying about their brand.
If you’ve got the budget, I’d recommend trying a monitoring service designed for small businesses. But if you don’t have the budget, don’t despair. You can do a very good job managing your online reviews in about two to three hours a week.
If your company’s “marketing staff” is only one person, keeping your monitoring to a manual check of each major review site might be smarter than investing in more software than you need. After all, we know that small businesses tend to underfund their marketing, and there may be other areas of your business that need resources more than this.
Want to know one more reason why I think most small businesses can do without a monitoring package? Because it’s critical for a human being to be reading and responding to reviews. This is one area of your business that can sometimes require all the emotional intelligence you can muster.