 Hey guys, Landon McArthur here with SecureAgent Marketing. Today we're going to discuss a highly, highly asked about topic and that is managing your online reputation customer reviews. There's good things to do. There's bad things to do. There's pros. There's constant doing things all types of different ways. I wanted to touch base on this particular topic because I get a lot of questions about it first off. And also it's not something that you really should just be flying off without thinking through. So your online reputation is important because of the fact that people are making more and more purchasing decisions without ever talking to a human. Or at least choosing who they're going to reach out to based on sort of their online presence. Your online reviews is a portion of what people are going to look at together reaching out to you in the first place. So I just wanted to talk through that a little bit really quick. So one of the things I want to do is I want to talk through some do's and don'ts. One of the things that first thing I'm going to go through the do's and then I'm going to go through the don'ts. So the first thing that I would say is make sure you're responding quickly within 24 hours. Typically if you respond outside of 24 hours you really aren't showing that you actually care and your response time really is expected to be within 24 hours if you can. Most of the Google reviews and Facebook reviews they give you sort of notifications so you should be able to jump on that pretty quickly. That's important. Another thing that you want to do is kind of keep your response brief. Don't throw like a big old, you know, well we'll talk about that in don'ts, but don't type a paragraph full of excuses. Just kind of keep it brief and try and bring that review. Your number one goal obviously is to get that review taken down by helping the customer solve their problem. You also want to own up to whatever the complaint is about even if it wasn't your fault, okay? So just take responsibility no matter what. Nobody wants to look at the back and forth of, you know, me versus you. It just doesn't look, it looks combative. So, you know, whether the problem is true or isn't true, just the perception of the back and forth argumentative just kind of gives the customer a potential. Well, what if I have a problem? Are they going to argue with me every single time? You know, because the customer typically, you know, can be looked at as always right even if they aren't. But from the public perspective, you want to just take the customer's always right approach. You want to offer to fix the problem, try and bring that conversation off of the review, try and get them to take it down. Have some sort of negotiated method to be able to say, you know what, I would appreciate it if you take that review down. I'll be happy to do anything you need to fix this, you know, within reason. What can we do here to get on the same page? That kind of thing. You also want to follow up with your promises. You know, the worst thing is to try and over promise and then deliver. So if what you say is, I'm going to do XYZ and you don't actually end up doing that, then they're probably going to jump back on and give you another review with it. I mean, you're just going to further throw gasoline on the fire in my opinion. So some of the things that you don't want to do is number one, don't ignore it. That's self-explanatory. You know, if you look through your reviews and you have, you know, 14 bad responses out of 35 total responses and there's no response from the business, that's not an ideal situation. The next thing you want to do is you don't want to write a lengthy monologue full of excuses. I already kind of touched on this. But, you know, really there's no point to go there. It's just an online argument at that point. Because the interpersonal communication aspect of communicating is sort of taken out of the scenario whenever you're doing this whole back-and-forth review thing. There's just no point in writing lengthy responses with excuses and explaining things. It just doesn't even matter. Just try and, publicly, you want to just try and offer to fix the problem. You also don't want to write a defensive response or blame the reviewer. That's not ideal as well, just for the same theme as what I've been talking about before. Also threatened to sue seriously. That just creates a, just a dynamic that's like explosive. Like, never, ever put that out in public. That just creates a situation. Even if what they're doing is potentially damaging you. I have seen people like, oh, I'm no stranger to, you know, to bring this thing to court. If you know, blah, blah, blah. It just comes across as just horrible, no matter what, even if you're right, even if they're completely wrong. Everybody is going to get a bad review from somebody. People are, the only thing that we can do these days is kind of go fire off and pop off online. And so it's just going to happen. No matter how good your business is, you're going to get a bad review. You're going to get a one or two star review. So you need to kind of plan for how you're going to respond to that and never sort of threaten anything. And also don't leave fake good reviews. That's really weird and awkward. So some people will go in and kind of go in their own personal Gmail and leave good reviews. That's weird. Just don't do that. I mean, people can kind of see through that sometimes. That's a little bit about the do's and don'ts of sort of how to handle those reviews. I have some examples that I'd like to kind of talk through. Let's see. Here's an example of like a fake review and how to actually handle that fake review. So this is a two star out of five star review. It says they do a great job when they complete it. Price wise they're very expensive. Only great thing is they are for some reason insurance approved. So no need to wait to get an estimate and they have XYZ on location. So this is the response to handle this fake review. Hi, we don't seem to have your name on records. Is there any chance you're writing on behalf of someone else? Either way, can you let us know which location you visited and a little bit more about the problem with you mentioned when they complete it? If you can please call me XYZ at XYZ. So you want to kind of address it. Make sure that publicly you're saying, look, we don't have your customer in records. You don't want to call it a fake review, but you want to just kind of dismiss that altogether. That would be an example of how to handle that. Another thing I wanted to give you, here's another just example of how to respond. So this is a particular like four to five store review where it says great place to work, quote unquote. Pros, flexibility and working hours and working from home, employee focus, good benefits, nice people with good pipeline. It is work, hard and party hard, atmosphere, cons, flat structure, no proper pathway to move to the next level, many processes to follow. One tends to get in lost in the process requirements that become convoluted every year. So here's the response from the particular employer. Thank you for taking the time to leave us your feedback. We're delighted to hear that you value the efforts we have put towards creating an environment where everyone at this place can thrive. As you mentioned, our employee focused approach is what drives us to offer great benefits and support a driven but fun space. Regarding the concerns you raise about upper mobility at XYZ, please know that we consider career development a path that can have many diverse options, upper mobility being one of these options. We also strive to provide opportunities that allow our teams to embrace different forms of growth that can broaden your skills and knowledge of many areas at our company. If you're interested in ways to learn more about other areas, we encourage you to check out the opportunities at this place here and they have the link for the careers page. So that's an example of kind of how to address that. You may already have kind of known that, but to me, the main thing with all of these examples that I've given is really the key is to just publicly just take ownership and try and bring it offline to get them to take down the review. That's the key. So whatever it takes to get the review off of the situation of your page, your Google My Business, your Facebook, whatever it is, they pretty much alone have the power to take that down. You have the power to respond. You want to assume that the person reading this review and potential that could potentially reach out to you in a lead form or a potential purchase is going to kind of look through the reviews. It is important. So you want to kind of just do whatever you can to acknowledge it, don't be combative, and then try and bring that offline to solve the problem. Now, another thing that actually matters with reviews, especially with Google, is Google does take your reviews into consideration when it comes to search engine optimization. So your website has a particular domain authority, and reviews, amount of reviews along with the star rating with Google does affect your domain authority. So, you know, it's all connected, but you want to make sure that with Google, there's more than just the customer aspect to pay attention to when it comes to reviews. You're also making sure that you're trying to solicit reviews as well to get more reviews for Google to look through and more opportunities to have good stories through your page and also, you know, higher star rating. People are just kind of accustomed to like, you know, if you're working or choosing between four or five companies and one has a three star and one has a five star subconsciously, you're going to gravitate towards the five star whether you acknowledge that's the reason or not, especially with AdWords. So AdWords has these call extensions that you can actually put reviews on so that you can actually, if you have a five star, you can put that call extension on Google AdWords and use it as sort of a, you know, look at me, we got a five star review with 1400 reviews or whatever. So that is important to pay attention to. So I hope this content was beneficial for you guys. It's something that sometimes you don't really think about, but I would love to kind of, you know, hear any feedbacks or concerns or even if you have any examples of, you know, good review responses that you have, share them in the comments for us. We're all here to learn together. I would love to see that. So just follow, if you're interested in talking further about search engine optimization, website development, any of this stuff with secure agent marketing, we are built to serve the insurance industry. Follow the website link below and we'd love to get started with you.