Don't ignore online reviews from your customers

Jan. 1, 2020
If you haven't done it lately, type your shop's name into Google and hit the "Maps" tab.
Camille Eber

If you haven't done it lately, type your shop's name into Google and hit the "Maps" tab. Whether or not your company has a website (and you should), there's a good chance one or more of your customers has written a review of your shop online. Some of those reviews will show on your Google Maps listing. (Among the other sites to check are Yelp, CitySearch and, once you register for free, Angie's List.)

If you're not checking these reviews regularly, set up a reminder to do so a time or two each month. It's worthwhile because all your efforts to attract new customers can pretty easily get shot down if vehicle-owners read a few bad reviews as they're deciding where to bring their car or even just looking up your address.

Now it's important to remember – both as a business owner and a consumer yourself – that some of those reviews could be totally bogus, written by a competitor or an angry former employee. Sure, that's frustrating, but there are steps you can take to mitigate the damage from such reviews.

But the real reviews – good or bad – can actually become both powerful and free advertising and testimonials for your shop. Shops with even just a handful of such reviews say those words are something a lot of new customers mention when they bring in their cars. It's my understanding that reviews also may help bump your shop closer to the top of the first page in search results.

Here are my suggestions for making online reviews work for your shop:

  • Don't try to game the system. Read 10 reviews of your shop or another shop and you can quickly start to pick out ones that just don't sound like the others. A glowing one, for example, might use a little too much industry jargon that most consumers would never use, making you wonder if it was written by the shop. If you can spot the suspicious ones (good or bad), others can too. Don't try to manufacturer good reviews for your shop or bad reviews for your competitors – it's unethical and not a worthwhile use of your time.
  • Don't go ballistic when you get a bad review. Instead, treat it as a way to show publicly how you address an unhappy customer. Most sites offer a way for you to respond (although you usually need to register with the site first). Do so briefly and professionally, without being defensive. If you know the reviewer, indicate you've contacted them to try to make things right. If you don't know who wrote the review, respond with something like, "We never want a customer to leave unhappy, and I apologize that we didn't meet your expectations. We'd sure like an opportunity to fix that, and hope you will contact us directly about this." If you feel you've been the "victim" of a bogus review, most sites allow users to report or "flag" inappropriate reviews.
  • Cultivate real customer reviews. The best way to counter a bad review is with a whole lot of genuine good reviews. Put the energy you might expend steaming about a bad review instead into encouraging more customers to review you online. We're giving every customer a flier asking them to review us, including some simple instructions on how to do so at Google.

Some of the sites filter out some reviews using a complicated system that some businesses believe is based on whether your business advertises with that site. (Based on what I read at review sites and elsewhere, some sites filter out reviews based more on whether the reviewer rates businesses regularly or was a one-time poster.) But in any case, I don't think it's worth trying to game the system, or fight with the sites over which reviews they filter out.

Instead of being confrontational, I'd rather put that energy into creating more happy customers – and thus more positive online reviews.

Camille Eber is the second-generation owner of Roth & Miller Autobody in Portland, Oregon.

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