Who is Accountable for Your Online Reviews?

Here are 🤯 3 stats that will immediately reprioritize your week...

• 81% of consumers will consult online reviews before making a purchasing decision.

• 91% of these people will look at fewer than 10 reviews before deciding.

• 22% of consumers will not buy from a business because of a single negative review.

🤔 So, what does this mean?

1️⃣ If you want new customers, you have to make sure the reviews that are written about your business will attract them.

2️⃣ Review management is a continuous effort. You can't afford to get distracted or take your eye off them because they are constantly being created.

3️⃣ No matter how amazing your product is, negative reviews will occur. Knowing how to handle them is essential; a well-crafted response can reverse the reputation damage and even have a positive effect on attracting new customers.

If you don't have an owner and a strategy for actively managing your online reviews, you are undermining your own growth potential.

Don't believe me? How about this Harvard Business School study which reported that for every one star increase on Yelp, a restaurant can see revenue increase between 5-9%!

Reviews are a byproduct of expectations vs. actual experience

Customers will rate your business on how well you delivered against their expectations. They form their expectations through controllable and uncontrollable factors.

😡 If customers' expectations are not met, they will enjoy the experience less, and are therefore less likely to visit again or buy more, and more likely to share their negative experience. In fact, 48% of dissatisfied customers will tell 10 or more people about it. (yikes!)

🙂 If a customer's expectations are met, we have an equal chance of seeing them again, but they won't necessarily be loyal to our brand. Loyalty is only created when they are more likely to choose our brand over another brand under similar conditions.

😁 However, if we can exceed their expectations, customers will come back, and they are likely to bring their friends. 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive experience.

With numbers like these, we have to be intentional about the experience that we design. Every controllable factor should be inspected and adjusted to ensure that they support the overall experience consistency and delivery of brand promise.

"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things." - Winston Churchill

What if online reviews could be controllable?

Short of ghost writing every customer's review, we obviously can't control what they say and how they say it. However, an intentional experience design does give you more control over the impact of reviews.

By having an active review management process, you can actually leverage them as a way to share your voice, your values, and your service levels. Generally, consumers understand that mistakes happen, and usually when they read a negative review they will also read the business's response. How well we respond says a lot about our brand, and will ultimately determine if the prospective reader of that review will become a future customer.

Here are some ways to get started:

1️⃣ Ensure that a member of your team is accountable to managing online reviews as part of their daily responsibilities. This action-oriented person should have excellent writing and customer service skills and be empowered to make decisions on the brand's behalf to make a situation right. Don't forget to have cross-training redundancy built in because reviews will still be posted if that person is on vacation or unavailable.

2️⃣ Courtesy of mobile devices, public reviews are often posted in real-time so the timeliness of responses is critical. Set up monitoring (alerts) on all review channels that your brand is active on. Focus on Google (the dominant top source), Yelp, Facebook, and TripAdvisor which own 88% of all online consumer reviews.

3️⃣ Not all negative feedback comes in formal reviews and so social comments and hashtags should be monitored and responded to as well. Consumers often use social channels out of desperation to get attention during escalated situations. Respond to every review and comment as soon as reasonable, but within 24 hours to make your customers feel heard.

4️⃣ Resist the impulse to be defensive after a negative review. Getting into a public debate isn't going to serve your brand, and often only makes the situation worse. Handle it professionally, briefly, and empathetically. Offer to take their complaint offline so that you can help to make the situation right. Visibly demonstrate to other readers how customers will be handled when something goes wrong.

5️⃣ Fake reviews happen and they can be really painful. Disgruntled employees, competitors, jealous family members, or bored drunken frat boys can all do damage to your business. If you are dealing with an internet troll 👹, there are some methods you can use to have fake reviews removed. Familiarize yourself with the rules of the community so you can construct your removal request most effectively. Do your best to prove to the platform why you believe the review is fake (because unfortunately, you can't just take down every negative review), and don't be afraid to appeal if you are denied the first time.

79% of readers have read a fake review in the last year, but 84% of them can't always spot one.

6️⃣ Don't ignore the positive reviews! Use your response as a way to repeat back any positive language that they used and also add in keywords for your business which will also help with raising your SEO ranking.

7️⃣ Staff training is essential. Your front-line employees (or bots!) have the biggest impact on how a customer feels when they have an interaction with your business. Make sure that the experience that they deliver is consistent and on point to the brand promise. 89% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases after a positive customer service experience while 63% of customers will stop using a business after a single poor experience.