Depending on how long your company has been around, you more than likely have had to deal with a negative review that someone has left, somewhere.
Oftentimes these can be total NIGHTMARES to clean up!
Surprisingly, most companies that have negative reviews will never address them, and will allow for their brand to continue to be publicly shamed online.
In reality, reviews of your company, good and bad, are extremely helpful in giving you an idea of how people are perceiving your brand.
These experiences are great learning opportunities for you as a company to understand that some people have possibly had horrible experiences with your product or service.
Some people have had tremendous experiences. Wouldn’t you like to know that, and document what made them good or bad?
I recommend starting with doing some very basic Google searches around your company or your products and services.
Type in your company name, and then “review” and see what you can find. Also, really great places to look for reviews depending on your industry are Amazon, Yelp, G2Crowd, and Industry associations.
Odds are, if you have feedback online, you’re going to find it in there.
Obviously, if you come across negative reviews, you have to stop everything and right that wrong.
It could be a disgruntled ex-employee, or maybe a client who was a “client from hell” and had unrealistic expectations.
Whatever it is, it still needs addressed.
If it’s vulgar or blatantly a lie, try reaching out to the platform directly and asking them to remove the comment all together.
If it’s not something that can be removed, make sure you first reach out to the client if you haven’t done so already, and that you also reply to the comment publicly so you can express your concern and heartfelt apologies… followed by an explanation and a remedy so the others who read these reviews know what happened.
When you look at the reviews online and what people left about your company, you want to grab words and phrases that you can “swipe.” This would be people using phrases like…
- “I love/like...”
- “I hate...”
- “I need/lack/want...”
- and other phrases that describe how people feel about the product.
You also want to keep an eye out for characteristics of how people describe what you’re selling.
We typically talk about our products and services vastly different than how other people talk about our products and services. We want to capture what they are saying, and document the language they are using. It’s a high probability that if one person describes you as something, another person will likely have the same terminology.
You can document your message mining findings in a proper document, and simply highlight the responses in the discovery guide.
You may find that you really aren’t coming up with any results in your searches.
If that’s the case - congrats! You don’t have a major clean up project to do!
I would recommend doing this exact exercise for your biggest competitors as well.
What you may find is that you desire for people to speak the same way about you as they do about your competitors.
You may ALSO find that your competitors are severely lacking in specific areas.
If this is the case, these are huge opportunities for you to capitalize on for your brand.
