We all deal with them almost every day. Whether we're researching a new product we're interested in, Googling a new Thai restaurant in town, or even just carousing our favorite social media sites, everywhere we turn we are faced with online reviews.
Now before I get too far into this let me state one thing: online reviews are awesome. We are all addicted to immediate information and there is no better way to feed that addiction than to read about other consumers' interactions with products, places, and services that we're considering using. Don't believe me? Leave your smart phone at home for a day and then tell me you weren't jonesing to Google something.
That being said, from a businesses point of view reviews can be terrifying. We're going to skip right over all of the possible fraud involved (there is a TON) and save that for another blog post. Let's talk about real reviews and how they can hurt. We've ALL had poor experiences at different businesses. We've all bought a product or two that were "lemons". Unfortunately, these things don't always represent the business at its normal operating level. We've all had bad days and we know how they can affect us at work.
Now, the ultimate idea of online reviews is that reoccurring themes will surface over time. This is definitely true, but we haven't reached that perfect pinnacle peak of society where every business is getting enough reviews for that to come true. A lot of us read reviews, only a few of us are writing them. And if your business has 8 reviews, and a couple of them are 1 or 2 stars, things aren't looking good for you, especially as purchase decisions are being more and more driven by mobile.
Here's a fun fact, the difference in 1 star in that 5 star rating system can be as much as 9% conversion never walking in your door. How does that feel? You just spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on advertising and now almost 10% of the people who WERE GOING TO BUY from you are now never going to even come in because a few people voiced their frustration on that ever-expanding internet thing. And it's only going to get worse.
So what's the remedy? A text a day. Your customers are already using their phones, we all know this. So why not give them a chance to use those phones to connect directly to you? Well first off, we don't necessarily want to be giving our personal phone numbers out to everyone on Earth. Understood. But there's got to be some way to remedy this problem.
(Entrepreneurs enter stage left)
TalkToTheManager has created a way for you and your customers to connect using text messaging that keeps both you and your customers phone numbers private. So now they can be honest with you, and you can solve their problems before they leave and write that nasty review. Just solving one customer's issue with you can be worth a lot more than that one person coming back to your business. It can be worth 9%. Now let's throw some buzzwords in there like analytics *and *operational trends. Now you can drill down and figure out where those problems are occurring - pretty rad.
Why not go for the win-win? Your customers get their expectations met, you get loyal customers, all because of a text message.
A text a day keeps the bad reviews away.
Find out more about how TalkToTheManager works.