I remember the first presentation I saw about the power of online reviews. The speaker instructed us how to use our smartphones to take quick testimonials right on the sales floor whenever we had a happy customers. I looked at my notes from the presentation and read …
“Get them to post their reviews before they even checkout. That’s when they are happiest.”
I also remember around the same time reading about Yelp and the problems with reviews there. Yelp was accused of suppressing good reviews and only showing an equal mix of both good and bad reviews. Yelp’s argument was that most good reviews were false anyway and that the people reading the reviews needed to see both the good and the bad.
I had never even looked at Yelp because I thought it was only for restaurants and west coast businesses. I immediately checked out our listing. To my surprise (and delight), there were no negative reviews posted, mainly because we didn’t have any negative reviews.
Then I got the extortion letter from Yelp. If I signed up for advertising with them I could control (somewhat) my negative reviews. I remember thinking three things at that time.
First, I didn’t have any negative reviews to control on Yelp.
Second, I didn’t see the return on investment for running ads on Yelp, partly because I didn’t and still don’t see much return on investment for any brick & mortar running online ads, and partly because I didn’t see Yelp as a big deal for indie retail.
Third, anyone that was already looking me up or finding me on Yelp was either going to visit me because I was an indie toy store or not visit me because I was an indie toy store. The reviews were a minor part of the decision process. More importantly, anyone who didn’t know me, then found me on Yelp, and was debating whether to visit was basing their decision on every single interaction they had ever had with an indie toy store.
The reviews were just the reinforcement of their already-established bias.
That’s the reality of how we read reviews. We first have an established bias based on our own beliefs and previous experiences. We look at reviews to reinforce those beliefs. We’ll justify away negative reviews for places we expect to love, and discount the reviewer’s opinion when it is at odds with what we expect.
In the back of our mind, we’ll also wonder how many of these reviews—good and bad—are simply made up.
About the only time we’ll heed the reviews is when they are heavily slanted to the negative. When everyone is saying something bad, we’ll decide the business is an outlier and shun them.
(Note: I talked about how to deal with negative reviews here.)
Does this mean you should ignore reviews for your business? Absolutely not! You should always be checking your reviews. If they slant negative then you have a problem you need to address with how you run your business. Even one bad review might be enough to warrant a change in policy to make the experience better for your customers.
If they slant positive, great! Keep up the good work!
Only if you don’t have any reviews (because you’re a new business or have only recently claimed your online profile) should you actually go after getting them. If you’re running your business correctly, the good reviews will take care of themselves.
Because of confirmation bias, though, you don’t have to lose sleep over your reviews. Just keep an eye on them from time to time and make sure you run your business so well that the positive organic reviews outweigh the negative ones.
At the end of the day the most important “review” is the one-to-one where your current customers talk about you to their friends.
-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com
PS Of all the reviews online, pay most attention to your Google reviews. These are the ones that most people will see because A) Google is the top search engine. B) Google Maps is the top Map App.
PPS If you are a restaurant, reviews are much more critical than if you’re a retailer. How you respond to each review goes a long way to how people will view your restaurant. Read this about negative reviews.
The type of review can also be important. If a review complains that something was out of stock, that can happen when a lot of people want to buy it. I would shrug that negative review off. BUT, when a negative review talks about customer service, and you see a couple in the same time period, that weighs in more for us. My wife altered hotel vacation plans at the last week before our departure because of 3 negative reviews about front desk customer service. Before changing reservations, she called and spoke to the manager, who didn’t seem phased about the reviews and said they didn’t have a problem with their front desk. She cancelled immediately and chose another hotel.
Yes, the type of review plays a huge role. But even in your example, the reviews alone didn’t change your minds. Only when you called and the manager didn’t care about the reviews did you choose another hotel. Great example! Thanks for sharing.