How Reputation Management Can Help Keep A Negative Review From Getting Out Of Hand
Imagine this: you own a thriving business
Imagine this: you own a thriving business. You offer a better product than your competitors, and at a better price to boot. Your business plan is solid; your for capacity for expansion nearly limitless, because your online sales are strong. You pride yourself on your customer service and willingly post feedback, comments and reviews on your own website.And then in happens. Someone's shipment gets lost by the postal company. As soon as they complain, you call the shipping company and work with them to try to find the package, but to no avail. You then apologize to the customer and offer them either their full money back or the option to have a replacement shipped at no extra charge.
Usually this solves the problem--most people can understand the occasional problem with the post. Usually, the worst that happens is the customer takes their money back and shifts their business to a competitor. But this time, it's different. For whatever reason, this person is really upset, and it's not enough to simply take their business elsewhere.
They may start by making a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, but they won't stop there. They give you bad reviews on every consumer review website they can find. They complain about you on their blog--a popular one, as it happens, that receives hundreds or even thousands of visitors each day. Some of their fans pick up on the complaint, and reprint or summarize it on their own sites, or through social networking sites like Facebook.
Before you know it, one unfortunate accident has blossomed into negative information scattered across a hundred websites. Now when people search online for your company name or product, at least half of the first few pages of results contain negative reviews or opinions. This is crucial because less than one in a hundred potential customers will look at any site beyond page three of the search results.
Your online sales plummet. Not only are you losing money right now, you're also losing the opportunity to impress these people and gain their repeat business. Even if your online reputation improves soon, these customers have already gone to your competitors, and assuming they receive decent service, there is a pretty good chance they will never do a web search for you again, and never hear all the good news about your product.
Finally, to cap it all off, the lack of customers means you have fewer people who can be impressed and write positive reviews, which is going to slow the recovery process dramatically.
What can you do to prevent this happening to you? The good news is there is a simple answer: online reputation management. This service looks through the search results for your product and company, and isolates the sites which contain positive information. Then, using a variety of techniques, they build these sites up in the rankings, moving them forward on google and other searches. Boosting these positive sites makes the good information more available to your customers, and pushes the negative ones back into those little-seen later pages of results.
by: Christian Heftel