4 Mistakes People Make With Review Management
It’s quarter to five on a Friday afternoon prior to a busy dinner service at your restaurant. Your phone pings - an alert from Yelp. If you’ve found yourself in a similar position before, you know that the dreaded ping from a review account can produce immediate anxiety. With a deep breath and a silent prayer, you open the review and read it. Not Good. A recent customer had a horrible experience and felt the need to let you (and the entire internet) know about it. GREAT TIMING.
While online review management can be emotionally and mentally exhausting, there are some easy ways to make the experience more positive, and ultimately help you gain customer loyalty. Here are four mistakes people make with review management, and how you can avoid them.
Ignore the review
As much as it can feel like someone’s heated words aren’t worth our time, ignoring a problem typically will not help to resolve it. You need to respond to your reviews, and you need to do so in a timely manner. A review that goes ignored is just sitting out there for potential customers to read - and they will most likely think the worst. By responding, you have an opportunity to provide clarification, not just to the unhappy guest, but to potential customers.
Communicating the review to your staff at the wrong time
Whether a review is positive or negative, it is important to communicate legitimate customer feedback to the appropriate staff members. This can be tricky. None of us want to hear bad news when we are in the weeds, but sometimes there are lessons to be learned from within the review. On the flip side, exposing your staff to the positive reviews can go a long way with employee moral. Consider compiling your reviews into an easy to read document and distributing them to your managers once a week or so. This will give them access to the data, but not derail them during inappropriate times.
Failing to leverage reviews to your advantage in your marketing materials
How many times have you responded to an online review and then moved onto a different task? Positive customer feedback can be a valuable asset to growing your business. Consider posting positive reviews on your web page or social media accounts.
Buying Reviews
Whatever you do, please please do NOT buy reviews online. It may seem like a quick fix for a mismanaged review account, but I can assure you it is not. When a company has purchased positive reviews online, it feels gross, and your customers will see right through that. It’s also against many terms of service for companies like Yelp & TripAdvisor. Earn those online morsels of praise legitimately by providing solid customer service to your clients!
Have questions? Need help? Reach out and say hi.