So the best defense is to make sure that your customers or prospects come away satisfied in their dealings with your company. Don’t give people a reason to be frustrated or upset. Teach administrative employees how to manage customer irritation in a detached, effective manner. Discipline any rogue employees. Do you really want that salesperson who gave non-signing prospects the finger on the way out the door working for you? One way to ensure customer satisfaction and be alerted to any client issues early on is by surveying customers at the end of the job. If customers say that some aspect of their dealings with you wasn’t up to snuff, look into it and let the prospect or customer know that you did pursue it. That way the problem is identified before it ever enters the public domain.
Chances are, though, that something is still going to be said by somebody, somewhere, about their dealings with your company. “It’s impossible to have a 100% customer satisfaction rating,” says Audette, of Three Deep Marketing. “From time to time you’re going to have a job where things didn’t go well. So you need a plan to deal with the frustrated or upset customer. Then, translate that strategy to the online stage.”
SECOND LINE OF DEFENSE Defending your reputation against an online slam depends on where that slam shows up. If it’s on the BBB site, you can call the customer and address the problem to their satisfaction. If it appears on Angie’s List, you or someone from your company can respond online and, if you feel that the criticism was unfair or totally off-base, you can contact Angie’s List management and negotiate.
Complaint sites are another matter. As of Monday, Dec. 6, 2010, Ripoff Report had 564,088 reports filed against all kinds of businesses, including home improvement companies. Complaints can come from angry former employees seeking revenge or genuinely upset and frustrated customers who rush online to get the resentment off their chest. And if the complaint is nasty enough, and is positioned high up in the search rankings, it will probably cost you business.
There are two ways to address the problem. The first option is to hire a company that specializes in defending Internet reputations. Such companies have been around since Defend My Name was launched in 2005. In the last two years, as complaint sites have multiplied, so have reputation-defending sites. They work by creating new content using phrases from the negative post or complaint to push that posting back far enough on the search rankings that no one is likely to see it. They sell their services piecemeal — i.e., a “campaign” in which you can hire them to remove one particularly stubborn, odious posting — or in the form of a monthly service contract. What you’ll want to know from these services is how soon they can make the offending post go away — 30 days? Several months? — and whether or not they offer a 100% guarantee that the negative posting will really be gone.
Is it worth it? Few home improvement companies will admit to using a reputation defender yet. Bairstow says he believes that a company suffering under the onus of a really negative posting may well want to consider spending several thousand dollars to get that posting removed. “If you have a negative item that keeps cropping up in the organic results, I believe you should do whatever you have to do to shoot that down,” he says.
Another way to solve the problem is to leverage positive comments on review sites or elsewhere to counterbalance that negative post and to push it lower down on the page of organic search results. “People are aware of the review sites,” Boehm says, “and it’s an easy way to get word-of-mouth.” At last count, Thomas Construction had 71 customer reviews on Insider Pages, 41 on Citysearch, and 38 on Yahoo, the great majority of them positive. Bairstow estimates that few home improvement companies have more than 100 reviews posted online about them.
THE NEW BRANDING Online review sites such as Yelp, Bing, Google, Judy’s Book, Yahoo, Insider Pages — there are many — seek immediate feedback on someone’s experience with a service provider or a product. What home improvement companies are just beginning to realize is that customer reviews posted in these venues are gold, for several reasons.
For one thing, the positive impression made by a good review acts to counterbalance whatever negatives may be posted on that site. Positive reviews on review sites have the glow of customer testimonials and the credibility of third-party validation.
“It’s the best thing you can do,” Audette says. “Any review someone writes about your business is going to funnel into Google eventually.” He calls review sites “the new branding.”
