Posts Tagged ‘reputation’
The Positives from the Negative
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
One topic that comes up quite often when speaking to business owners on BView is the impact a poor review could have on their businesses reputation. They shouldn’t be so worried though. This article tells how the odd negative review of a business can make a potential customer trust those other perfect scores that little bit more – it makes feedback seem balanced, and obvious that the business has nothing to hide.
In my experience, any time I seek out a new business to work with I’ll seek out those few negative comments, not so I can find out what could go wrong, but more importantly, so that I can get an idea of how the company responded when things turned bad.
Earlier in the year when a reviewer complained that our offer of a Google Adwords voucher for new business members was “rubbish” for existing advertisers we took the time to address their concerns, and hopefully made the promotion a little clearer for everyone. Another great example of how important negative feedback is to can be seen in Louisa E’s comments. We worked hard to address each of the issues she raised about the site and are confident BView is better because of it!
BView knows how important it is to give business owners an opportunity to put their side of the story across and explain what went wrong and how they’ve set about resolving problems or complaints raised by reviewers. Through BView, businesses can add a response to any review left for their business, and this is a valuable way of showing how important customer satisfaction is to your company. If you’re looking for some more examples when a bad review ended up making the business look good, read this.
Potential customers will understand that no business gets it right every time for every customer and will be encouraged to see a businesses working hard to recognise where they’ve made mistakes and what they’ve done to correct them – and to make sure it doesn’t happen again!
Don’t forget that all feedback will have a positive impact on your businesses SEO (it’s visibility to search engines) so if you haven’t already, invite a few of your customers to review you on BView.
Tags: bad reviews, customer satisfaction, negative comments, negative reviews, reputation, seo
Posted in Business, Findings | 3 Comments »
A (Less than) Happy Meal
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
Today McDonald’s joined the roster of large corporations who clearly don’t understand Web 2.0. They emailed me today asking us to take down all of the 1,000+ listings we have for McDonald’s UK restaurants on BView.
We frequently get phone calls from businesses and threatening letters from solicitors asking us to remove a listing or customer review from BView – typically because they don’t like the review one of their customers has written. We always politely (but firmly) say “no”. We do not remove listings of companies that are trading, nor will we remove a customer review just because it is negative. But this is the first large corporate who has asked to be removed.
One has to wonder about the type of company would not want free advertising on the UK’s fastest growing, local search engine for 1000+ of their locations? Perhaps they do not like the reviews our members are writing about their McDonald’s?
Last month over 160 of our members reviewed their local McDonalds. Comments ranged from…
“I really enjoy going to McDonald’s because the majority of staff really nice and they always put their customers before themselves.” — contributed by Marina Rose in Cardiff
to comments like…
“Dirty staff who look like they need work on their presentation. Food is always cold and the tables are never clean.” — contributed by a member about a McDonald’s in Basildon
The overall BView league table for UK fast food restaurants is interesting. Overall, our members liked their local McDonald’s somewhat better than their local Burger King. Ironically our members seem to prefer Burger King’s burgers, but Burger King loses points based on their restaurants’ lack of cleanliness compared to McDonalds, where members frequently comment that “there is often a cleaner wandering around the restaurant tidying up after people, wiping floors, refilling straws and tissues etc.”
| Average BView Score | |
| Domino’s Pizza | 76.0 |
| Pret A Manger | 75.2 |
| Yo Sushi | 67.3 |
| McDonald’s | 63.1 |
| KFC | 62.8 |
| Burger King | 60.2 |
However neither burger chain seems able to compete with the fast, highly reliable delivery of “piping hot…tasty” pizzas that Domino’s delivers to BView members. Members at uni also like the student discounts that Domino’s offers. Both Pret A Manger and Yo Sushi also garner high marks, but are consistently marked down by members based upon ratings for value.
So what should McDonald’s (or any large corporation) do?
- Engage. Stop ignoring and start responding to customer reviews. Companies who respond to negative reviews show that they care about their customers and build credibility with their online audience. Companies need to understand that each review (and their response) will be read by thousands of people over time.
- Pro-actively manage your online reputation. Find places to interact online with customers and potential customers. Michael Dell recognised very early how powerful the Internet is for building (or harming) a corporate reputation. Not only does Dell actively respond to online feedback. Dell seeks out new ways to interact with customers and potential customers across the Web. Such actions have significantly enhanced Dell’s reputation.
- Take action. If a restaurant in Basildon is dirty, clean it up! Talk to restaurant mangers who have staff that are rude and praise those whose staff are polite. There is nothing that builds’ credibility or loyalty more than acting on customer’s concerns.
The Head of eCommerce for big UK retailer yesterday told me “I don’t need to engage with my customers online. Our customers know where our stores are and we get hundreds of letters every month from our customers.” Another retailer (who employs thousands and spends millions on television advertising) told me “we don’t have the resource to respond to customers online.” Such companies are ignoring the power of the Web at their peril.
BView and Web 2.0 are about empowering people. In recent elections in the UK and US we saw how power is shifting from traditional journalists to bloggers. In a similar way, big advertising budgets will become less effective and sites that aggregate customer reviews will become more powerful in influencing and forming corporate reputations.
Tags: burgerking, BView, dominos, kfc, mcdonalds, pretamanger, reputation, web20, yosushi
Posted in General, News | 1 Comment »