Google is now letting local businesses respond to reviews that get posted on their Google Places Page. This will be huge for reputation management for small local business owners who frequently are target by bad reviews from legitimate and sometimes not so legitimate reviews. You must have your listing verified before you are able to respond to reviews.
To help business owners in responding to what can be irate customers, Google offers the following recommendations.
- Be nice. This isn’t just a guideline — it’s also a good idea. You aren’t going to win an argument with a frustrated customer. And you don’t want to burn any bridges. Even customers who initially had a bad experience might come back.
- Don’t get personal. Remember that you’re replying to feedback about an experience, not about you as a person. Reply in a way that addresses the overall experience, and remember that there’s a real person on the other end. If you believe the review violates the posting guidelines, please use the Flag as inappropriate link.
- Feedback is helpful. Both positive and negative feedback can be good for your business and help it grow (even though it’s sometimes hard to hear). Think of all feedback as an opportunity to improve.
This is excellent advice, especially #2.
Google also offers some ground rules for what to post as a business owner responding to negative reviews.
- Be polite and professional. You’re responding to one person, but the response is public. Keep your responses useful, readable, and courteous.
- Keep it short and sweet. Users are looking for genuine responses, but not necessarily novels. Don’t say in twenty words what you can say in ten.
- Be appropriate. Responses should comply with our local content policy.
- Be thankful. A customer who has written a review has taken the time to invest in the success of your business.
- Respond to happy reviewers when you have new or relevant information to share.You don’t need to thank every reviewer publicly. One response reaches to lots of customers, not just one.
- Feedback is a chance to improve. If you’ve made a business improvement based on a review, thank the user and share the change. You don’t need to address every single complaint.
- Be a friend, not a salesperson. Your reviewers are already customers, so there’s no need to offer incentives or advertisements. Tell reviewers something new about your business. Share a tip or something they might not know from their first visit.
Google also offers reviewer posting guidelines.
- Don’t spam or post fake reviews intended to boost or lower ratings.
- Don’t post or link to content that is sexually explicit or contains profanity.
- Don’t post or link to content that is abusive or hateful or threatens or harasses others.
- Don’t post or or link to any file that contains viruses, corrupted files, “Trojan Horses,” or any other contaminating or destructive features that may damage someone else’s computer.
- Don’t post any material that violates the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of others.
- Don’t impersonate any person, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity.
- Don’t violate any other applicable law or regulation.
- Don’t use comments as a forum for advertisement.
Also.
- Make your comments useful and informative
- Post clear, valuable, and honest information specific to the content which you are reviewing. content which you are reviewing.
- Try to include both positives and drawbacks.
- Be nice to others; don’t attack others.
- Keep it readable; don’t use excessive capitalization and punctuation.
- Use good grammar and check your spelling.
Unfortunately, this information targeted towards those posting reviews will probably never be seen by 99% of consumers doing the reviewing.
Reputation management is almost always something a business reacts to as opposed to planning for. The time to control what shows up in a search for your business name should be before something negative is posted online. I offer reputation management services for those needing help with this segment of a businesses online presence.
Link to this page
Nashville SEO, Google Places and Social Media Marketing. Serving small businesses in Nashville, Franklin, Brentwood Tennessee and every city across the US and Canada!
Finally a blog that understands how customer service works. Nevertheless, it is easier said than done to stay calm about bad reviews when they profoundly effect you. How do you get rid of fake bad reviews that competitors might have posted ?
Hey Frank.
Trust me, I know very well how bad reviews or slanderous, hateful information affects people personally and businesses as organizations and the owners/operators of businesses as well. Unfortunately, in almost every instance, you are not able to remove that piece of information. Your only option is to get more positive reviews posted. There is a process for this but it is easily something that can be done by the individual or business owners. The easiest way to get more positive reviews posted is to collect customer contact information and always follow up with an email thanking them for their business and asking them for any input they may have about their experience with your business. Obviously negative experiences should be dealt with immediately to prevent a negative review from being posted somewhere. Likewise, positive experiences should be acknowledged and you can then encourage those happy individuals to share their experience on the variety of review sites that are showing reviews in your Google Places page.
We work very hard to try and get customers to post citations or reviews but googles process is long and intimidating with phone calls and such. These days i am just happy when a customer commits to go through with leaving a review, and imo i think a customer that is mad and had a bad experience is more motivated to leave a bad review than a good one.
Tampa Carpet Cleaning Services
As time moves on, more and more people are becoming aware of these reviews on Google Places and it’s critical for business owners to get positive reviews. I believe more people are aware of this because of Google+1.