It helps if you are tracking your calls so you can listen to the recordings and get in front of an unhappy customer and fix it before it goes sideways.
Transcript:
Hi everyone. It’s Pat and Angie Cherubini with Hometown Revolution. And this is day nine of booster business in 30 days. At this time I did, I did not make a mistake. Well, today’s topic is going to be in. Remember, we’re still in the build stage. So it’s building, protecting and managing your reputation. So, so that’s what we’re going to go over today. And when we talk about reputation, we’re talking about reviews, reviews that are out there in the public, whether they are on your website or they’re on Facebook or Google. So, you know, what is reputation management?
It’s the fancy marketing word that people like agencies and us use to sound important, I guess, but their reviews and it’s, you know, Yelp has built a billion dollar business on it. Yellow pages, Google Facebook has recommendations. It’s just a review. So it’s what your customers are saying about you and Amazon. Oh, huge review site, tons and tons of reviews. So what happens is anybody now has a voice that they can use on the online, you know, good or bad that they can post a review about you. And why do you need it? That you need it to continue the conversation of your future prospects, future customers that they get to. They continue down that trail of knowing you, liking you and then trusting you. This is the trust factor where it comes in is if they have a, what we call social proof, you see it online everywhere. Most people can tell whether it’s real or not. There’s there are a lot of fake reviews. Um, people buy reviews, but you can kind of tell if it’s real, especially in the local market. A lot of times you recognize the names, right?
Right. And most people it’s just think of it as validation. It’s validation of what you do. And, um, gosh, a lot of times, most people won’t leave a review unless they’re asked, unless they’re ticked off. And then they’ll, they’ll always, they’ll usually always go to social media. We have clients that have dealt with this.
Yup. Quote, we say that if you do good to somebody, they’ll tell two their friends, but if you do something bad, they’ll tell 20.
But the big thing to look at too, is that, you know, you need to do that because if you’re like me, I go and I read the reviews, I’ll read it. You know, I’ll go through eight to 10 reviews, which I think is what the pretty much, what the standard is of how many reviews people read about a business. Yeah.
And it’s like, uh, we should have looked up the number, but there’s a huge percentage of the amount of trust people have in reviews. People trust what they read
And it’s even more so if you, you know, if you’re a company that responds and, you know, responds to a review, whether it’s good or bad, I, you know, when, and I, I, for one do that, as soon as I look at a company online, even if they may, they may not have a ton of reviews. But if I go into those reviews and look, and I see that that company is responding, then I, then, you know, that’s validation again, it’s real, they’re taught. And they’re talking to people,
This fear of not asking for reviews, because they’re afraid they’re going to get a bad one. Yep. You know, if that’s a real thing, you probably need to look at your business practices and do things in a different way that doesn’t lend towards bad reviews. Yeah. I mean, it’s, most people, it’s just an irrational fear, but you know, you’re going to get a bad review. Most of them are going to be ridiculous, but you will get a battery. You know, certainly you’re going to somebody off or you’re not going to see eye to eye. And in today’s world, people think that that’s the way to handle it. And they’re going to try to cancel you, but that, that’s so rare, even though you see it so much on the news, you know, that’s that little tiny percentage that, you know, that’s just what the news does is they show that, that top percentage of the negative thing, and it’s not really happening that often it does. What do you do?
Oh, you, you respond to them. And um, and I know that that is an issue with people because you know, working with clients that we already have, that is something that a lot of them are concerned about. And they, they fear that. And you, you just got to get over the fear. You gotta kind of look at reviews the same way you treat people who walk in your door. And you know, if someone’s got a complaint and walks in your door, how do you fix it? You try everything you can to fix it. You do that same thing by responding to them online, in whatever, you know, whether it’s on Facebook or it’s on Google or wherever it is, do the same thing. If people can see that you’re trying to resolve the issue, then it, it’s not going to look bad on you. It will look bad on that person.
I think people are very clear. Most people are logical. I’m probably more logical. So I think they’re all logical. But you, you, if you read reviews, you know, there are a lot of Karen’s out there. That’s going to be crazy.
Yeah. And not carrying the cat. If any of you follow me.
If, if there was a Karen that’s right. Something crazy and you respond, or, you know, if you’ve seen another one where somebody just, it just sounds stupid, irrational. Um, we hear them all the time. You can usually, if you respond rationally to them and explain what happened and explained that you’re open to trying to solve it, usually most people can see through that and see all they’ve got, you know, 15, five star reviews and they’ve got this one star review and you read through it and then you go, Oh, that’s a Karen. She’s an idiot I can tell already. And if I answer and it’s, and it’s not something, you know, don’t let them hold you hostage because you know, you say you bend over backwards trying to please a customer. And it’s not always the customer. The customer’s not always right. But you blend, you bend over backwards trying to please him, but it doesn’t mean you have to bend over forward for him.
I can’t believe you just said that. Okay. Well, let’s, let’s, let’s why don’t you show them at least our, our listing, our agency company listing Cervini company. Yeah. That one we’ve got reviews there. We have, uh, 29 reviews that we have on there. Honestly, we should have more. And now that, um, I will say that now that I am in the system, that we push all the time, I am working on that. So, um, getting more reviews is really important, but that’s, that’s where you see them on Google and then on Facebook. And don’t make fun of me because even on Facebook, I’m not, I, I really, I don’t push the Facebook reviews as much because the reason being is I believe more people go to Google to see the reviews or to my website, which if you go to our website, you can see that I have, uh, testimonials in there that are actually pulling in from our system, from both Facebook and Google, which is nice. And, you know, we’ll show you that in a minute,
This is all automatic. This is on our agency website, not our hometown revolution.
Yeah. Three different companies. But, um, we just wanted to, we just wanted to show you that. And I think I lost my train of thought or you interrupted me. Oh, Oh yeah. In our system and whatever system you decide to get. I, I guess the, the biggest thing that I think people ask me or, or say to me is, you know, how am I supposed to keep up with managing Facebook reviews and Google reviews? You know, I don’t have time. Well, there are systems out there that can help you with that. They can do it automatically. Ours does. That’s why we’re going to show you ours, just to be able to show you what a system like this can do for you and can save you time and ultimately help you make money. So this is our, this is our dashboard for, in hometown revolution for chair of beanie company and all those reviews that you saw on Google and Facebook that I have are now actually pulled into our system here. And the cool thing about it. Not only can I see them all, but I can respond right in the dashboard to each review that’s on there just by typing in information in there, and then clicking that update button. The other cool thing, at least in ours is for Google. I can share Google reviews to Facebook and to Google plus. So that’s pretty cool, but I mean, the beauty of it is, is I can see everything here, um, all my reviews,
And you can respond to Facebook too. They all come in the same spot, Facebook because they’re not reviews. They don’t use stars so that they won’t show up. But our system automatically is trying to read what they’re saying. And if it’s green, it’s a positive response. It’s trying to figure out the intent of that review. So you want to make sure that you’re getting good reviews. If it’s bad, you can see it on your dashboard that, you know, you’re getting bad reviews.
A lot of times these systems are connected to a review, um, a review system where you’re actually requesting the reviews. So we’ve got that in ours. And any other system that you use, it’s usually that way. And what I mean is it’s, it’s like an automatic email can go out or an automatic text can go out that can ask for that review because, you know, we all think, Oh, just because we did such a great job for somebody that they’ll get on that social media, and now tell everybody about you,
Or you jump onto the next job and you just run out of time and forget about it.
I don’t. So don’t ever feel bad about asking people for review, do it, you know, nine times out of 10, they’re like, sure. Yeah. I didn’t think about that. Of course.
And it’s a, it’s a way to get even closer with your customer. You just ask them, Hey, how was everything, if it wasn’t great, that gives you a chance to address that and fix it and re you know, improve your next time, whatever it is you do. If they work, if they’re happy, you usually know who you want to ask for reviews, but if they’re happy and everything went great and say, Hey, I explained to them, this helps our business grow. We would really appreciate it. If you could just drop a review and here’s the link.
So basically, um, you know, ending, this would be, if you don’t have a review system, either you can do it by hand in Google and Facebook and you know, on your website or get a system similar to ours that can do it automatically and save you time.
But you know, the strategy and how important it is. You should already have your Google, my business page set up. Cause we did that earlier. We did the Facebook page. We did that. They’re already there. You have the system, you just have to come up with the strategy of asking for it and it should be everybody in the company, front desk, anybody on the phone, once it’s done, Hey, we need more reviews here it is. Yep. That was good. And that’ll help you grow. And that those reviews will get you more business.
It’ll help you build. Yep. So, all right. So tomorrow we’re doing question and answers over the whole build section. I would say in the bill, I would say in the build section, in the build section, any of those topics of what we just went over, I would say try, we’ll try to steer it to that
Just in your business. Ask us a question. Yep. Okay, bye.
We’ll do it his way for now.
Seriously, whatever you want, we’re here to help you. We have the forums available. We have the Facebook page. Yep. Click an email. You know, we answer, if you’re getting emails from us, you just respond and we that’s us. We’re actually answering emails, so, okay. Well, onward and upward until tomorrow based. Bye.
Author: Pat Cherubini
Join me at the new Ultimate Online Marketing forums. Co-Founder of Hometown Revolution and supporter of local. Join me in the fight to polish up the hometowns across America and bring back a little Main Street USA glory that has been lost by spreading the word about your favorite small businesses and their owners.Join us and learn how to get your own "customer catcher" so you can make more by doing less. :)More from Pat Cherubini