What are your customers saying about you and why it is important
There has been a proliferation of review sites over the past year. More and more web searchers are checking review sites and making the decision on who to deal with from these sites.
Three quick questions
- Do you know what is being said?
- Are you using the information if you do?
- How do you deal with it?
Lets try and give you some answers for these questions.
Obviously a few of the review sites are monetizing their site by having you pay to be notified of new reviews of your dealership. Sometimes you can get the chance to reply before it gets posted. This can be advantageous if you can react and correct a problem but trying to be a member of all the possibilities and with more coming on line almost daily it can become expensive.
As long as they are all competing and no true market leader has appeared this probably is not your best resource. There are two free resources that should be used by every dealer.
You can set up an alert for any name or term and Google will email you as soon as their spiders find anything new. This way you will know exactly what is being said about you almost as soon as it hits the net. (Or at least as fast as Google finds it and that can be quite quickly.)
I prefer to set up a separate Gmail account just for alerts as that allows me to keep my research in one place. You can keep track of anything this way including your competitors. Think that can be valuable information?
I have added a good video I found that will show you how to use both Google Alerts and Technorati to keep track of what is being said about you on the web.
Now that you know what is being said what do you do with it? It is great to know what is said but what you do about it is the real key.
If you are seeing complaints about your process look at ways to improve it. This can be in any of your departments. If you are not using the information that customers are adding to the internet about you and your competitors to find portions of your process in both sales, service and follow up to improve you are missing valuable intelligence.
This can be both positive and negative information. Dealing with the negative information is what most people leap on first but…
The positive information can be more valuable as it can help you develop a unique positioning in your market but is often overlooked. These may show you things that should be added into all your promotional efforts and they already have social proof behind them.
You will need to be transparent on line to use the internet effectively. We haveĀ earner articles on transparency and transparency part 2 that you should check outĀ so we won’t cover the same information here.
If there is a problem you need to fix it. Addressing the problem and dealing with it can gain you much more than trying to ignore it. Make sure that you are taking part in the conversations about you in a pro active way.
If you are reacting positively and just as important promptly you can gain much more web credibility with future customers even if it is a problem that you just can’t fix but can address with your side of the story. If you can fix it and do promptly this is the absolute best result.
Ever notice that the customer with a problem that is promptly fixed can become your best evangelist?
Hiding your head in the sand and ignoring it like an ostrich will only make it worse. Go out of your way to create evangelists and ask your satisfied customers to add favorable reviews to the site of your choice.
Don’t try and scam the system though as this will back fire on you and will hurt you in the long run.
Now go get the intelligence that is freely available but more importantly take action on it today and everyday.
It will improve your business.
