Just because you’re not active with social media doesn’t mean others aren’t talking about you and your cleaning and restoration business.
Customers flock to Facebook and Twitter to communicate both positive and negative consumer experiences. Social review sites like Yelp are exclusively devoted to letting customers talk to each other about businesses and service providers.
This is how the world communicates now, for better or for worse. You never know who may be talking about your business. But you need to know when they are. Don’t let everything you’ve worked so hard for be tarnished because you didn’t have the knowledge and tools to protect your reputation.
Remember LeVar Burton? He’s an actor that was in several high-profile projects, including Roots and Reading Rainbow. He’s most well known for playing the role of Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Burton has a lot of followers on Twitter. A lot of followers that one day saw this:
When Burton tweeted this, he had more than 1,400,000 followers. This message was then retweeted (forwarded, or rebroadcast) by more than 20 other Twitter users to their followers, whether or not they followed Burton themselves. Those retweets included the link in Burton’s original message, which takes you here:
Did 1,400,000 people actually see this? Of course not, but you can bet a lot of them did. Those looking for a rug dealers or carpet cleaner in that market surely saw it because it’s easily found on the first page of Google search results.
And how did the proprietor of the rug cleaner company respond? Either he failed to reach out to Burton to try to solve the problem or he flat out failed to notice. More than a year later, Burton’s negative review is still there and the company’s Yelp page still links to it.
What can you do to avoid this happening to your company? First, set up a Google Alert for your company’s name so you can monitor when people mention your business online. Turn the positives into testimonials to attract new business and address any negative issues swiftly to demonstrate that your company doesn’t tolerate poor customer service.
When you do reach out to dissatisfied customers, don’t be defensive and don’t be aggressive. Don’t focus on the merits of the issue. Focus on the problem and make it clear you want to solve it. Listen and ask questions until you find the pain, and then fix it.
There are plenty of Internet users who just enjoy complaining, but you’ll find that most people with a legitimate customer service issue just want their problem solved. They will be happy to remove or correct a negative review as long as you just take care of them.
