Unfamiliar Real Estate: Surviving a Negative Review
If you are the owner of a business with an online component, you may have found yourself on the wrong end of a scathing review. No doubt your knee-jerk reaction is to want that review to disappear, erased from cyberspace forever, where no potential customers could ever see it. You may worry that too many poor reviews will damage your overall Seller Rating and affect sales. But don’t panic–negative reviews are more common and not as damaging as you might think. In fact, negative reviews are a critical component of an honest portrayal of your business, an important aspect of your company’s public image, and a tool for improving your product and its presentation.
How Do Seller Ratings Work?
Seller Ratings are an automated extension of your reviews and ratings from independent review services. These reviews and ratings are gathered from a variety of web-based platforms, such as Google, Yelp, Facebook, Zillow, Realtor.com, and your business’s website. When potential customers see the compilation of these reviews in one place, they can see at a glance an image of your business. This snapshot makes Seller Ratings are a great way to build trust and loyalty with your customer base. A higher rating is built on a greater number of good reviews, so of course your goal is to generate a large number of positive reviews from genuine sources. That being said, all business are bound to encounter poor reviews at some point; the question is, how do you handle them?
Managing a Negative Review (or Two!)
As a business owner, you naturally take pride in the products or services you offer, and a negative review may sting at first. But a close reading of negative reviews reveals that most of these reviews do not trash the product; more often, they highlight a specific complaint, either about that particular product or an associated factor such as shipping fees or delivery timeline. This type of feedback is useful both to you as the owner and to other customers, and how you handle it shows potential clients the type of customer service you offer. For example, even businesses such as home security are becoming part of the reviews-based industry. “JustinP” left the following review of Home Security Store: “Takes a long time for order to process and ship out.” This complaint gives Home Security Store the opportunity to address the issue with the customer, investigate their own shipping practice to see if this is a common problem or an isolated event, and demonstrate to other clients how well they handle complaints. If the company responds directly to the negative review, other customers can see their willingness to deal with problems that do arise.
Which brings us to another point concerning negative reviews: any real company will have real problems, and people understand that. A few negative reviews mixed in with many positive reviews demonstrate that you run a real business, with ups and downs, which is what customers expect. In fact, studies show that a small number of negative reviews make a business seem more trustworthy–one study by the Harvard Business School found that when a company had all positive reviews, 95% of the viewers thought that the reviews were false or had been screened to remove any negative feedback. Showing negative reviews shows that you are willing to show all reviews, and people prefer to deal with an honest business. Rather than run from a negative review, use it as an opportunity to give customers a realistic vision of who you are: a business that may encounter difficulties but is willing to accept responsibility and make things right.
Dealing with False Reviews
So, negative reviews don’t have to be negative for your company, but what about negative reviews that simply are not true? Unfortunately, fake negative reviews are a sad reality of online commerce today. Competitors may write fake reviews, or hire freelance writers off of Craigslist or Fiverr to do so, in order to make you look bad. That this is unethical and even illegal does not mean it will not happen to you. Intentionally deceiving customers through false statements, positive or negative, is against the law and companies have been fined as much as $300,000 for doing so, but the practice continues. Review verification is one strategy you can employ in order to guard yourself against false negative reviews. At eKomi.com, we provide services to verify all of your online reviews, positive and negative. When consumers see the symbol authenticating a review, whether positive or negative, they know that they can trust the review and the company willing to publish it.
Making Your Reviews Work for You
Managing your reviews, positive and negative, is an important part of your overall business strategy. Humans tend to think in terms of stories and personal anecdotes, so a telling review carries a lot of weight with a customer trying to make a decision. Surveys show that between 68 and 90% of people rely on online reviews when purchasing online. Positive reviews result in lower bounce rates, cart abandonment, and refund requests. As we discussed above, negative reviews, when handled correctly, can become a platform for demonstrating your commitment to your product and customer service. To make your reviews work for you, we at eKomi.com provide an authentic review solution that will increase your number of reviews, verify them, and aggregate them into one online location. That way, anyone who finds your company through an online search will see all of your reviews in one location–a much more powerful statement than a few reviews scattered here and there on various websites. How do we do this? We provide automated review requests after purchase, which will increase your number of reviews. We then collect the reviews from multiple sources, such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Yelp, and your own company’s website, and verify them. The verified reviews are published and promoted with a verification symbol, advertising to online readers that yours is a brand they can trust.
Whether you are a realtor helping people to find their dream home or a home security store helping people to protect their homes, your future sales will become more and more dependent on online reviews. We can help you to make the most of them.
