A scant few years ago, the only reviews a local business would get were from friends who had been there, or perhaps a newspaper if you were lucky. Nowadays, however, all your customers are critics, and they have tools like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Google Reviews to put their opinions out to the rest of the world. Even the street hot-dog vendor has a star rating. This is great because it means getting exposure is so much easier if your customers are broadcasting how much they love your business; but on the other hand, those same customers can leave a few scathing reviews and really sabotage your reputation.
ServiceThatSells.com has an article about online reviews (“Your Success Is Written in the Stars”) where the writer cites a BrightLocal consumer survey: did you know that as much as “97% of consumers looked online for local businesses”? Additionally, “49% of consumers need at least a four-star rating before they choose to use a business”—that’s astounding, no? Potentially half of your potential customers might scroll on to the next business if yours falls below that threshold. Worse still, “Reading negative reviews makes 40% of consumers not want to use a local business.” Ouch. That means that even if you hit four stars out of five, a bad review can still turn off over a third of the readers.
The article goes on to list a few really good pieces of advice, including how you should encourage your satisfied customers to leave online reviews, which will help mitigate any bad ones, as well as how you should respond to the negative ones that do crop up to show that you care and want to “make it right.” Lastly, the article recommends monitoring your competitors’ reviews to learn more about what they’re doing (be it their promotions, what customers think of them, or anything else).
That’s all great, but we have a bit of advice to add to that list: you might have guessed it based on what kind of company we are, but we know the smartest action you can take is to mystery shop your business. Because good mystery shopping companies use real consumers, you’re going to get genuine, actionable feedback. Doesn’t it make sense to head off any potential problems before you read about them in an online review? In other words, you should get this information privately before a problem becomes public.
Mystery shopping will help you uncover how well your customer service works and what people think of your products and services. Quality control now will save you a lot of headaches later, so don’t let those online-review stars break you. Evaluate your business—and even your competitors’—with The Brandt Group’s top-notch services today. Tell us about what you’re looking for here (https://thebrandtgroup.com/contact), and we’ll develop a plan together.
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