Since Precison Garage Doors of NJ Opened in 2000, Doug Bencsko, the owner, has guaranteed 100% satisfaction. The problem was the only way to measure it before online reviews was in the number of complaints, which really didn’t work. The thought process was no complaints = 100% satisfaction but of course that isn’t always true.

To fix this problem, Precision started to encourage every customer to review their business online. This would provide positive as well as negative feedback to help improve customer service and make the whole process transparent to new customers.

Putting the process in place was decidedly low-tech. The first stop in getting positive online reviews is to make sure the customer has a positive experience. Then ask the customer at the completion of each job, “Are you satisfied?”. If the customer is not satisfied, NOW is the best possible time to find out why and fix the problem. If the answer is yes, then it becomes a good time to encourage them to write a testimonial or review.

You would think this process would be fool-proof, but alas, as you know, nothing is… and as a result a negative review can end up on Google.

Eventually, this will happen to every small business. Reviews can be really emotional. You need to look at it like it’s an opportunity. After all, these same people would have been saying these negative things about your business before the internet but it is likely it would not have come to your attention. Now you get the opportunity to address it. All small businesses should take advantage of that.

Getting A Bad Review Out Of Google

We discovered, quite by accident, how to get a bad review out of Google. This method is also decidedly low-tech and will only work when the review is legitimate. If the review is fraudulent refer to this thread.

On a Saturday afternoon in March, Precision Door of NJ got a scathing review from a very unhappy customer. The next day this unhappy customer received a telephone call from the Owner.

The owner thanked the customer for taking the time to submit a review of his business on Google. He let the customer know that he took reviews seriously and that he appreciated the review because it gave him the chance to fix the problem. He also used the time to understand the customer’s problem and see if he could rectify it.

It turns out the customer had a legitimate gripe. A couple of things had gone wrong on the call, and on top of it the customer was charged for something he probably shouldn’t have been.

Doug was able to use this opportunity to refund the customer’s money. And as importantly, he was able to get additional training to an employee he wouldn’t have otherwise known needed it.

Although the customer still wasn’t thrilled he went back to Google and posted another review of the business – A 3-Star Review.

The interesting thing that happened was that the original review disappeared. Our guess is that Google only allows an individual to review each business once. (If anyone can confirm this we would be very interested.)

Either way to get the bad review out of Google you need to treat the bad review like an opportunity, thank the customer for taking the time to post it, and work with the customer to thoroughly understand the problem.

It really helps to have a system in place that does 2 things: Monitor your online reviews and make it easier for your customers to review you online.

You can see all the reviews for Precision Door NJ here.

About the author: Tim Coleman has been involved in Local Advertising since 1996, when of all things he started selling yellow pages. In 2004, he moved to the internet department with Verizon and has been involved in Local Search ever since. He writes whenever time allows at Convert Offline

Yelp has become huge phenomenon in many parts of the US in helping consumers decide which restaurants to frequent and which services to try.   Here’s a post from the Yelp Official Blog that has some nice tips on how small business owners can leverage the tools Yelp has provided to small business owners.

At the bottom of the post is a video interview with an owner of a fairly new Philly Cheese Steak restaurant in San Francisco.  Within 1 year the new Phat Philly has received over 300 reviews.  The owner also talks about how he uses Yelp to communicate with his reviewers and how he turns many of his reviewers that have given him a bad review into long term customers.

Here are the 4 Steps that are outlined for Business Owners to Leverage Yelp:

1. Unlock Your Free Business Page

Go to https://biz.yelp.com and claim your business.

There’s a video for new users on how to use Yelp for Business Owners as well.

2. Post Sales and Special Offers

This can be extremely powerful as mobile search becomes main stream.  The other day Don and I were looking for a place to eat in San Francisco.  Don took out his iPhone  and next thing you know FourSquare is telling us what restaurants are providing specials based on our location using the iPhone gps.   I wouldn’t be surprised if the Yelp mobile app started
providing this feature in the near future as well.

3. Respond to Reviews.

After you claim your business, as the business owner, you can login to your account and respond to your reviewers both publicly and privately.

4.  Focus on Great Customer Service

We couldn’t agree more. Great customer service is the engine that drive great reviews.

North Valley Optometry Case Study Series

As I mentioned in my last article on How to Make it Easy for Your Customer to Leave an Online Review we found that it is most effective to send a follow up email to our patients with links to our Yahoo and Google Local profile to request a review. I “genericized” it just to give you an idea of what we found effective and you can see it’s a short an simple note:

Follow Up Email Template

Hi (Customer Name),

It was great to see you at your recent visit with us.

I wanted to thank you for being part of our community.
We really appreciate you putting your trust in our care.

We are finding that on-line reviews are becoming an important part of
our business. I wanted to ask if you could take a minute to write a review
for us on Google and/or Yahoo. (the links are below).

http://tinyurl.com/YourBizGoogleReviews (blog note: links don’t work)

http://tinyurl.com/YourBizYahooReviews

Thank you very much we really appreciate it…

Warm wishes,

(Your Name)

———————–
Your Name
Your Company
Your Business Address & Phone #

URL Shortener

What I like as well is to use a URL shortener like TinyUrl or bit.ly . The url are not as intimidating as the long url’s from the local profile for your business and you can create a custom url that looks more relevant for your business.

Here’s a really cool tip we got from our friend Tim Coleman of A Second Opinion. Tim mentioned that once they provided customers with this url the number of customers that actually left a review increased.

You can append the url in the google link with &action=open and the customer can just start typing. They won’t need to find the link on the google profile page to leave a review.

here’s an example with everything stripped out of the url but the customer ID and above

http://www.google.com/maps/place?cid=8662613135025207509&action=open

On Page Customer Testimonial Page

Mike Blumenthal recently shared a review process that he set up for one of his clients, Garnering Reviews – A Mom & (no) Pop Shop finally Hops on Reviews and how it has helped their business. Instead of sending out an email they hand each customer a piece of paper with a note and a url to their reviews page www.barbaraoliverandco.com/review which takes to a page that has some customer testimonials and this note at the bottom:

North Valley Optometry Case Study Series

At North Valley Optometry we tried a couple of different ways in the process for asking for online reviews.

Simply Ask  My wife is the business owner and optometrist.  She would primarily be the one to ask the patient if they would be open to giving them an online review.   She would either weave it into the conversation if it was appropriate some time during the eye exam or one of the girls on her staff would ask the patient for an online review if the patient was there to pick up glasses and didn’t necessarily have an appointment with the doctor.

Send Follow Up Email with Links to Review Sites  At first the office would just ask the patient if they would be open to giving them an online review and than hand them a piece of paper with a thank you note for leaving an online review.   The note also had  links to their Yahoo Local,  Google Local , Yelp and City Search business listings so the customer would not have to search for their business listing.  What were the results?  After a couple of weeks, asking and handing out 30-40 notes zero customers wrote a review.

Less is More – Ask for a Review on Yahoo and/or Google   We decided the paper process just wasn’t very effective.  A better way to go is to send a follow up email after asking the patient if they would be open to writing a review.  The email has a short note and we offered links to only 2 local directories.  Why do ask that we only ask to leave a review on 1 of 2 directories opposed to giving the customer more choices like City Search, Yelp, Insider Pages, Yellowpages, etc…?  Wouldn’t more choices make it easier for the customer?

I’m not a subject matter expert in the world of psychology, but I have read a number of books and articles noting that too many choices lead a person to take no action.  Recently the NY TImes had an article called Too Many Choices: A Problem That Can Paralyze.    There are studies by economists that have shown that 401K participation actually drops if there are too many options for the employee to choose from.  Following the thread on professor Sheena Iyengar’s work I found this article Choices: why 4 is better than 5, 3 is better than 4, and 2 is better than 3.   That enough social proof for me to confirm my internal gut feel or at least make me feel better that less is more in this case.

If I think about it from a customer view point it would seem to me to be a bit overwhelming if I received a follow up email asking for me to write a review on 1 of the following 10 directories.  In just scanning through it I might think this is more of a hassle than it’s worth, “delete”.   The question “is it going to be a hassle?” is also one of the reasons why we chose to just ask for a review on Yahoo and/or Google.  I’m guesstimating 70% or more of the patients we ask either have Yahoo or Gmail account.  So that makes it easy for them to write a review after they click on the link and sign in.  If we asked them to write a review on one of the other directories most likely they would have to create a new account and than write a review.   In my mind that would be a hassle and do I really want to create a new account just to get more spam?

Reviews Show Up Right Under the Yahoo & Google Local Listings

The third reason why we chose just to ask for reviews on Google and Yahoo is those are the 2 search engines that drive most of the traffic to our site. If our customers and potential new customers are finding us on Google and Yahoo wouldn’t it make sense to have the reviews showing up right on those business listintgs?  On the left image you can see how North Valley Optometry really stands out from it’s competitors in the Google 7 Pack with 48 reviews.

Obviously it would be great to have multiple reviews on multiple sites, but my thoughts are right now is to just make it as easy as the possible for the customer to take action and write a review with the least amount of hassle.

We are always looking for best practices.  If you have a best practice or story you want to share in online reviews please contact us at info@myreviewspage.com

In a recent study Nielsen surveyed over 25,000 internet consumers over 50 countries in April 2009. The study found that 90% of consumers trust the opinions of friends that they know and 70% trust the opinions of customers that left an online review..

90% Trust recommendations from People They Know

70% Trust Online Reviews (consumer opinions online)

What can we take away from this? Word of mouth is still the most effective method of advertising. Online Reviews is becoming Word of Mouth on steriods. There can be a very strong argument that can said of online reviews are now the most important method of “trusted” advertising because of it’s reach and permanence.

What do you think? We’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments below!

Have you ever had that thought in your mind, that if I start asking my customers for online reviews, what if I start getting a bunch of negative ones?  That’s a common fear that we all have…. “what if”?  Here’s the reality, if you have a solid business, you have a solid base of customers who are your raving fans.  Sure there is a possibility of a few negative online reviews creeping in, but isn’t the reality most of them are going to be positive?

That’s what the experts say.  Bazzaar Voice conducted a study surveying 1300 online reviewers.   What they found was that the majority of consumers that post online reviews are motivated by “goodwill” and “positive sentiment“.    The study also showed that almost 80% write reviews to reward the company and positive reviews outweigh negative reviews 8 to 1 (or another way of saying it is 87% of all online reviews are positive).

Yelp also wants to clearly show that on their site 85% of all reviews are positive with the majority of reviews being 4 and 5 stars.

If you’re thinking about starting to ask customers to write a quick review for your business and your feeling a little hesitant about the “what if”, take comfort in knowing that most online reviews are positive.

Mike Blumenthal has put together a nice post outlining a framework for local businesses to consider in encouraging their customers to write an online review. Unless you are restaurant, coffee shop or a point of interest, customers leaving online reviews is not yet common practice for most businesses.

Yet, in our experience in working with small businesses to implement local search engine optimization strategies, online reviews are incredibly important from a marketing perspective as well as building an online brand that is going to last on the web forever.

Mike outlines the following framework as principles and best practices in asking customers for online reviews:

We are really glad Mike is putting together a series on this topic because we also believe this is an extremely important area that most local businesses need to start focusing on as part of their online marketing stategy. As business owners we all know that you can do everything “right” and still have an unhappy customer for various reasons. And sooner or later someone is going to leave your business a bad review. So why wait until that happens?

I’m currently working with an optometrist who has had a successful practice for over 15 years. In regards to online reviews his business has a total of 3 online reviews, all of them are on Yelp and 2 out of the 3 are bad. If you are in a business where it is not common practice for customers to leave an online review why wait until someone leaves you one? Why not encourage all of your customers to leave an online review, especially the customers who love what you do? That will probably be a more realistic representation of your business and customer sentiment.

As Mike has outlined in his framework I think the top 3 points to highlight are:

1. Easy
2. Ethical, and
3. Integrated Process

To start building online customer reviews you definitely need to make it as easy as possible for the customer. As well intended as most of your customers are going to be in leaving an online review, the fact is most will not, so you need to make this as a part of your process in doing business and be committed to the process for the long run.

Ethical is pretty self explanatory, I don’t think you ever want to be questioned in gaming the system or lose trust in your customers.

As a business owner I would love to have reviews from different customers on multiple directories. From an online review perspective that would be nirvana. In our experience if we are asking our customers if they would be open to writing an online review we have found it more effective to ask to write a review on 1 of 2 directories versus asking to write a review on 1 of 10 directories. It might sound counterintuitive, but according to a lot of the leading experts on “choice” like Sheena Iyengar, giving less choice is actually better than more.

Check out Mike’s post: Principles for a Review Plan: Considerations in encouraging customer reviews

Online Reviews are a touchy subject for small business owners. We intend this website as a place where you can come and learn about them, and how to leverage them for your business.

There are a lot of good articles and best practices being created by people in the local search community. We will be collecting and commenting on these articles to share here, and also share some of the things we’ve learned from working with small businesses.

We hope you will try our free tool, and participate in the conversation. Together, let’s make this website a resource for every small business who is venturing onto the Internet and curious how to make online reviews work for them.