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Online Reviews of Your Business: 5 Quick Tips to Get Glowing Reviews

Customer reviews can make or break your business. Future customer will only trust your business if your previous customers have only good thinks to say about it. Here's how to achieve that, in 5 easy steps.

3 mins readJuly 30, 2018

You want glowing reviews for your new business? Read this first.

Customers read reviews of products, vendors, or service providers before making a purchase. In fact, 86% of customers hesitate to purchase products or services from businesses with negative online reviews.

Reviews are a large part of your business’s online reputation and have a huge impact on your success.

Online reputation management is imperative and refers to monitoring, influencing, and building your brand’s virtual reputation. It shapes the public perception of your brand and helps establish trust for your products and services.

If you want to grow your small business, creating customer confidence and maintaining a positive online reputation is key toward your success.

Media: /online-review-management: 2

1. Request reviews from recent customers

First off, before you can efficiently handle your online review management you need to make sure your business has enough reviews. There are many ways to get customer feedback.

You can request feedback in person, over the phone, via email, on your website, or from suppliers and vendors. Whatever route you choose, make sure to accept all feedback, regardless of whether it’s a bad comment or a good comment.

Remember that customers are smart and will be able to recognize a genuine review from a fake testimonial. Customers can also find that reviews that are all good might be suspicious.

Here are 4 tips to get reviews from recent customers:

  1. Ask permission from your customers to turn their feedback into online statements.
  2. Make phone calls to past clients and ask them if they could share their experience on your website.
  3. Send an email review request to previous clients with whom you’ve had transactions.
  4. Collect customer reviews via “thank you” pages after they complete a transaction or purchase.

How to Ask for Reviews or Testimonials

2. Respond quickly to customers' reviews

Whether it’s a bad or good review, acknowledging comments goes a long way to establish trust. Moreover, responding to feedback is an essential step towards effective online review management.

Think of customer reviews as a way for consumers to say, “you did a great job.” When someone praises you, show your appreciation with a simple and sincere thank you.

There will always be positive, neutral, and negative customer reviews, but a negative one doesn’t necessarily mean bad for your business. If you know how to address this type of feedback, it actually gives your business a sense of honesty and a human touch.

Regardless of whether the review or comment is negative or positive, answering customer reviews is a great way to show that you care.

Follow these 4 tips when responding to customers' comments:

  1. Don’t ignore any review and try to reply as soon as you can.
  2. Go to review websites like Google or Yelp and check local business listings where customers can leave feedback. Many times business owners aren’t aware that their business is listed on these sites and people are leaving reviews.
  3. Don’t hide negative feedback. Instead, give a sympathetic response recognizing the customer’s feelings.
  4. Don’t argue with negative comments. Be a problem solver to address customer concerns and empathize with them.

For a quick glance of the do's and don'ts of responding to customer reviews, check out this infographic below from Patriot.

Do's and Don'ts on Responding to Online Reviews

3. Adapt your tone in each response

You can’t please everyone. If you’re in business long enough there will be negative reviews no matter how hard you try to provide the best service. But smart business owners don’t let their emotions dictate their feelings.

Behaving in a professional manner is very important when answering reviews on sites or business directories.

Keep your cool and have a sympathetic tone to neutralize the effects of negative reviews, both for the customers any potential customers who read the review and your response.

As a small business, always be prepared for one-sided comments or unfair reviews, especially on social media. Responding in an argumentative and defensive manner will do no good for your business. It will just heighten the emotions and create a battleground of comments.

Follow these 4 simple pointers before writing your response to each customer online review:

  1. Stay positive and be professional at all times.
  2. Consumers are not looking for perfection but rather genuine and caring answers.
  3. Acknowledge their feelings and always put yourself in their situation when responding.
  4. Be authentic, and transparent. Most people respect that you take the time to reply in a sincere and professional manner.

To find out Gary Vee's advice on how to handle negative online reviews of your new business, check out his short 3-minute video below.

4. Use an online review management tool

To save time thinking about how best to phrase your response to an online customer review, use an online review management tool to help you do that.

Simply paste in the customer's review into the tool and click a button. It'll generate a response you can copy and paste.

Here are some of our favourite AI reponse generators for customer reviews:

  1. Simplified
  2. Jasper
  3. WordHero
  4. AI Writing Assistant

5. Learn from your reviews to give a better service

Through your online review management activities, you’ll embrace the importance of reviews and the opportunity to learn from your customers.

Online feedback is a mirror of your small business, providing you with an opportunity to see how others perceive your business.

If you want to achieve a 5-star rating on review sites and search engines, use this as an opportunity to improve your business.

Your customers are telling you the things you can be doing better. Acting on customer feedback can help your business continue to grow.

Remember these 5 takeaways when using customer feedback to improve the service you offer:

  1. Find out what’s wrong and recognize the measures needed to make corrections.
  2. Analyze reviews and identify if there’s a deficiency or recurring pattern that indicates a problem.
  3. Improve customer service by training your staff in how to handle and address client feedback effectively and without confrontation.
  4. Publicize improvements that have come from customer feedback and show your customers that their input is valued.

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