The best reputation management firm will be able to pull your business around after an online slating, but here is just what your customers can do to bring harm to your business. Business success based on online presence continues to soar. Ignoring social media as an advertising platform is a potential disaster in the 21st century and in fact can cause serious harm to your business. The same is said for consistent and negative comments about your business appearing online. If people do wish to attack and you have a good online presence as you should have, the downside is that they can attack you on your Facebook, Twitter, website they can then slate you further on yellow pages, yahoo or google pages. If these review sites outrank your business’ own pages, then when anyone searches for your company they will get the negative press first.
Social media highlights why you should run your business professionally and deal with all customers as if they were the Managing Director. You should answer client’s emails and queries, even if it is just an initial acknowledgment to say that you are looking into the query. If you don’t these clients may bombard you online in search for their response. Your business can not allow this to happen.
Your business only needs to do one thing wrong or be the final straw in someone’s bad day and they can slate you as much as they desire online. Other potential customers will not know that this is slightly unjustified or excessive they will just take what they read at face value. If this does happen to you on your online sites do not ignore it. The best thing to do is engage with the customer immediately and ask if you can converse with them by email. Apologies and freebies often go a long way and I can assure you that they will be worth it in the long run! This is a much better option than hoping the situation will go away, the whole thing about the internet is that the feedback will not go away unless the person who writes it removes it. It will take an awful lot of work and probably expense to create and promote enough higher-ranking articles that the bad one fades into oblivion.
You must always remember that angry and disappointed customers are the most motivated, If we have good service we might tell one person if we have bad service we are more likely to tell ten. This has now expanded into the online world and this is the first place that we venture to decide where we might like to spend out next bit of hard earned cash. We will not want to take any risks.
If you do end up with some feedback that you can’t negate and any contact with the author has fallen on deaf ears then it can be worth contacting a reputation management company who can advise and assist you in which steps to take next to secure a positive outcome.
