Dealing With Online Customer Reviews

One of the big things any small business needs to handle is customer reviews. It can be a bit harder online since pretty much anyone, at any time can put a review up about you without your knowledge. The best thing you can do, as a small business is to monitor your online reputation. Spend some time or hire someone to spend the time, seeing what folks are saying about you.

I have found a number of recent articles that I think are worth your time reading.

5 Tips To Get More Online Customer Reviews by Andrew Shotland. Andrew offers some great advice on how to get customers to review your business.

Harnessing The Power Of Online Customer Reviews For Local Business Growth by Myles Anderson
“But when it comes to customers’ opinions and the public sharing of those opinions with a huge online audience, there is little businesses can do – except make damn sure their service is as good as it can be and to engage with their customers more than ever before.” “About 49% of local consumers are more likely to use a local business having read a positive online review.”

6 Steps to Building Buzz for your Small Business
“Take an hour or two and claim and optimize the pages that will be most important to your customers and then ask your customers to post reviews about their experience with your business. This can be done by adding links to these sites on your website and putting up signage in your business. Not every review will be stellar but that is ok – take the negative reviews as an opportunity to grow your customer service skills or enhance your product offering”

Nuking Local Competitors A Dirty, Rotten Trick byMiriam Ellis
Miriam talks about the new feature about stating a business is closed on Google. (Something to keep an eye on)