What is Your Reputation Online?
Is it bringing you leads or is it losing you leads?
Just like the real world, your business’ reputation depends on what people say about you. I you have a client or customer who is unhappy with their results in doing business with you, and if you don’t resolve their issues, they will cost you future business by leaving a bad online review.
Online they can go to any of a number of websites that specialize in hosting both testimonials (good reviews) and complaints (bad reviews). Once posted the only way to get rid of those bad reviews is to negotiate with the reviewer. They are the only one who can re-word or delete their review.
If a bad review can’t be improved or deleted, the only way to counter it is to get a lot of good reviews.
We feel that the best course for all of our clients is to get a lot of good, legitimate reviews and to do everything possible to avoid getting the bad ones.
We put a lot of thought into how to do that. Almost every scenario requires a lot of time spent by you contacting both satisfied and dissatisfied clients and customers to coach them through the confusing process of giving reviews. Not many of our clients have the time or the personnel to do all of that, so we came up with another solution.
We call it the Silk Short, Inc. ‘ARSe’. It stands for ‘Automatic Review System’. We added an ‘e’ to the ‘ARS’ to get a chuckle and to help people remember the ‘Silk Shorts ARSe.’ After all, we have tons of people who remember that “Silk Shorts is a ‘great fit’ for their business”, and some get a kick out of nicknaming us ‘Slik Shirts’ and variations on that theme. Not too many forget our name.
Anyway, we’ve implemented an automatic system that takes the name, phone number and email address of your customer (your input) and sends them a request for a review. It walks the person through the process and either encourages them to post their good review on the site you wish, or it alerts you if there’s a problem that needs your attention. (Of course, the ones who would leave a bad review are not encouraged to do so.)
There is much more to it, but we’ll go into more detail at another time.
I have worked with Silk Shorts and Vern and Jana since the 90’s, so I’ve had a long-term relationship with the company. I own Thompson+Brown Real Estate and Silk Shorts has worked with us designing and hosting our website and search engine optimization. They have been great to work with, always prompt to respond and or reach out if they see something that we might implement to enhance our web presence. I highly recommend them.