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For others it is a forum for the most important persons in restaurant that is the customers. If the customers are getting good service it will help the company to get customer reviews praising the services. On the other hand reviews will be bad if the customers are getting negative experience. The negative reviews are a signal for the restaurateurs to take some corrective measures so that the customer’s concerns are solved and they are made happy.
One may be surprised to see how everyone has become a critic these days due to the overwhelming popularity of the social media. Restaurateurs are the worst affected by this new trend as it will be difficult for him to judge multitude of reviews coming in user review sites. It can be considered as sounding board of some foodies attached to a restaurant.
Tips for handling online reviews
Never take it personally: Different types of reviews will come. Respond positively to the reviews. The online reviews and the persons behind them are going to be present in your neighborhood for long time. So do not neglect it. Give it proper response.
Share the reviews with your staff. Positive feedbacks are morale boosters. Negative feedbacks are disheartening, but they help one to find out the areas which require modification and improvement. Sharing the reviews will help them to understand the week points and improve themselves.
Make use of online review site’s services for bringing benefits for the money spent on advertisements and marketing. Try to increase traffic and attract tourists.
Listen to what customers say: Google Alerts can be used freely for monitoring the review websites. Or you can subscribe to some good reputation management service for monitoring all reviews about your company across the world. There are some review websites that notify you when new reviews are posted.
Get more reviews on a regular basis: Satisfied customers often do not post reviews unless you specifically ask them to do so. There are online services which send automatic emails requesting your customers to post their reviews. This technique has been found to be producing good results in improving the positive reviews of a company. These services provide links to the respective customers so that one can understand which customer submitted which review.
Promote reputation: Ensure that the button named “read my reviews” is prominently displayed on social media pages and on your website. This gives motivation for the customers to read the reviews and to write their review also. It will be better if you can create a separate web page for listing your reviews which should be directly linked to the review sites and your profile in such sites. You can add links to the reviews in a promotion or in a customer news letter.
Respond personally and fast: You must create a policy to respond faster to negative reviews and one person must be entrusted with this task. It will be better if response to negative reviews is sent faster via private messages provided you can locate his contact details.
It will be good if a policy for responding to negative reviews is formulated and if a special person is deputed for the above purpose. The best thing to do on receiving negative reviews will be to acknowledge the concerns raised by the customer in his negative review and explain him the steps taken by you for not repeating the mistake pointed out. You can also refund the amount collected by him for the service rendered and ask him for next visit for which you can give heavy discount also.
The money spent towards refund has to be considered as the money spent for maintaining the reputation of your firm and therefore it has to be neglected. If the customer is not responding to your initiatives, give a well drafted public response explaining the steps taken by you not to repeat the incidence and how you were ready to compensate for the fault and how you tried to resolve it with the customer.
Such extreme steps will give better results than that will be produced on installing online review generator. People usually give importance to others reviews about a firm or a product. But more than that they value an earnest attempt form a service provider to solve the issues and make compromise with a dissatisfied customer. Promoting the reputation of the company across social media and online review sites is important. Encouraging your customers to give good feedbacks can often result in good reviews leading to the promotion of the company.
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