You are here: Home / Blog / Negative Customer Reviews are Hurting Your Business. Here’s Why & Learn How to Fix Them.
By Suraj Jha on Dec 8, 2020
“Customer experience is the next competitive battleground. That’s the only place where businesses are won or lost.”
– Tom Knighton
According to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey, more than 90% of the respondents falling in the 18-34 age range claimed that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. And the thing you should note here is that a gigantic section of your target audience or prospects will prefer purchasing your products or services if your business has a 4.0-star review ranking or even better.
That’s the reason why most business owners or marketers spend hours trying to figure out how to get customer reviews.
Here’s a question for you:
When was the last time you took your family out to a new restaurant without one or more of your colleagues, family members, or friends recommending the place to you?
Probably been a while, right?
I’d say it’s rare these days for people to trust a business easily.
In this digital world, our business online reputation management lives revolve around online reviews, with review sites like Yelp, Amazon, Google, Angie’s List, Glassdoor, Twitter, Facebook, etc., being visited by millions of people worldwide each day.
If your business’ review ranking falls below 3-stars, then you will be missing out on more than 67% of your target audience or prospects. And that’s a number you can’t really afford.
Whether you are in-charge of an online store or a local shop or both, it’s essential to make sure that you are highly-focused on delivering the best possible experience and top-notch service(s) to your target audience, prospects, or customers, which will in-turn help you avoid any negative reviews and create a great first-impression in front of your consumers.
This brings us to our question,
“Why are online customer reviews considered this important, and how to get more?”
Let’s have a look.
Here’s a list of reasons why online customer reviews hold such significance:
Whether it’s someone we know or a complete stranger, when we see a person praising a business’ product or service online, the thought of purchasing something crosses our mind. And with more and more positive reviews we come across, our purchasing decision gets heavily influenced, and we are more inclined towards buying it.
Thanks to online reviews, multiple businesses worldwide have managed to scale their business, as they were able to drive 200% more sales within the first few months of managing their online reputation.
If you are a small or medium-sized business owner, most of your target audience won’t know about you. They might not have even heard about your business before.
It’s literally the first time they will be hearing about your business or visiting your website, obviously when you run ads or achieve the top ranking on the search engines for certain keywords.
And as we all know, “First impression matters the most.”
Before doing business with you, they will obviously want to trust you. They’d want to know that they are purchasing products or services from a brand that’s actually worth their time and can live up to their expectations.
Online reviews will help you drive sales and create an outstanding impression in front of your customers. In addition to this, it will help you make sure that your business looks trustworthy, which is the most important aspect you need to care about.
Let’s say you have been looking forward to purchasing a headphone for a while, and finally, you hop on to Amazon and look up for a few.
Obviously, you will come across a world full of options waiting for you to add them to your cart.
Here, what will fuel the decision-making process is the popularity of different headphones and the number of online reviews different listings have. After looking at the specifications, you will ultimately look at the number of 3+ star reviews different headphones have.
And based on this, you’ll end up finally purchasing a headphone that suits your needs and is popular among customers.
While reviews help businesses look trustworthy, they also heavily influence decision-making, which is why you should focus on getting a 3+ star review ranking.
Most business owners and marketers wonder how to get customer reviews because these online pieces of text can have a major impact on sales.
At Umbrella Local, we provide “Review Generation & Online Reputation Management” services to our clients, helping them manage their reputation, generate ongoing high-ranking reviews, address negative ones privately, maintain conversation history, track customer activity, and so much more.
Prior to getting in touch with us, most of our clients were subject to disappointing sales numbers. The reason? They hadn’t already started focusing on their online reputation.
Once our team took over, their sales numbers went up the sky as they started generating 2x-3x profits within the first few months.
And if you haven’t already, you should start focusing on your online reputation straight away.
But, while doing so, you should make sure that you are delivering your audience one of the best experiences of their lives. Otherwise, you may end up getting negative ratings, which will harm your business as nothing else can.
Let’s learn how negative reviews can tamper with your sales.
Here’s the list of reasons why negative reviews are a curse:
As I mentioned before, 67% of consumers don’t prefer buying from businesses with less than a 3-star review ranking.
Poor reviews on different sites like Facebook, Google, Yelp can tamper with your sales and lead to poor sales numbers.
Businesses with 1 to 1.5-star review rankings reported 33% lesser revenue than their competitors with 3-5 stars.
Negative customer reviews will drive your customers away. Not just the new ones, even the ones who have been doing business with you for years.
According to a research piece, even a single negative review can drive away nearly 22% of your prospects. Whereas three of them will drive away 59.2%, and more than four will lead to you losing 70% of your prospects.
“It takes a lifetime to build a great reputation,
but you can lose it in just a minute.”
– Will Rogers
About 50% of the consumers question the quality of the products or services a company with negative reviews delivers.
Ultimately, they end up doing business with the ones who have a good reputation on the World Wide Web.
So, if you want your business to look trustworthy and reliable, then it’s crucial to avoid any negative reviews.
As we talked about this before, negative reviews drive customers away. With high bounce rates and a lower number of people purchasing your products or services, you will witness a loss in revenue, which will ultimately lead to lower profits.
In addition to this, you may end up spending hundreds or thousands of dollars rectifying your tarnished reputation by applying different so-called effective tactics.
Looking for a highly-experienced online reputation management team to manage your business online reputation or deal with those annoying negative reviews?
Our experts at Umbrella Local are here to help. With our foul-proof Review Generation & Reputation service, we’ll help you automatically generate ongoing high-ranking reviews with our top-class review generation solution, automate one-click review generation on different leading sites, address negative feedback the right way and manage as well as engage with your team.
Wondering, “How to fix my reviews?”
Get in touch with us TODAY!
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