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Customer Reviews & Your Home Services Business: Friends, or Foes?

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It’s every Home Services Business owner’s worst nightmare. Not the one with the ax-wielding maniac chasing you through the woods at night, although that one’s scary too. We’re talking about the one where you’re having a “day from hell” at work. It’s midway through a Monday morning (which is bad enough on its own), in the middle of your busiest time of the year, and the projects your teams couldn’t finish before the weekend are still needing completion. As such, you have less-than-satisfied customers blowing up your phone lines, wanting to know when they can expect your crew(s) to come & finish what they left undone. On top of that, you already have a full day’s workload scheduled. Thanks to the backlog created before the weekend, customers who were “promised” an 8 AM start time this morning are also on your phone, wondering where your guys are. 

Top 3 Ways to Get Reviews for Home Services Professionals

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Naturally, this scenario would be rough enough on its own, but to make matters worse, one of your crew members – the high-quality one, no less – has called out “sick,” leaving you even more short-handed then you already were thanks to the lack of skilled workers in the pool. Everything that could go wrong is, and then the unthinkable happens: 
You get an email alert from your business’s Social Media channels, advising you that a new review of your business has just gone live on your page, for all the world to see & read. As if you weren’t already feeling sick to your stomach…
And then you wake up breathing heavily, soaked in a puddle of sweat, but happy as the proverbial clam because it was only a bad dream – this time! 
Let’s face it: There’s hardly a business owner out there that doesn’t hate the whole Business Reviews process. Even if your business receives nothing but stellar customer reviews on your website & across all of your Social Media platforms, everyone knows that it only takes one or two bad ones to mess up your company’s “star ratings.” The direct impact of a negative review is greatly affected by the total number of reviews your business has on any particular platform, so it’s imperative that you get as many positive reviews as possible to lessen the blow from a not-so-good one. 
Many clients of digital agencies like ours recognize the power of reviews and their impact on a business’s reputation. Because of this – specifically, the fear of receiving a negative review – one of the most requested services we provide is Reputation Management. For many Home Services companies in the Philadelphia & Central New Jersey region, hiring an outside agency to manage your online business reputation is worth every penny. On your behalf, they can send a note of appreciation to every positive review client, and promptly address any negative comments submitted. 
But as stated moments ago, the reviews “game” is all about volume; the more reviews your business receives, the better it looks in prospective clients’ eyes. So: How do you get more reviews for your Home Services business? There are many tried and tested methods available, but here are some you may or may not have considered: Our Top 3 Ways to Get Reviews for Home Services Businesses. 
If You Don’t Know, Ask: A considerable component of your customer service & satisfaction process is – or should be – asking the clients for feedback on how you & your company performed for them. Upon completion of any project, a quality control initiative, in the form of a phone call, or email with a short survey for them to fill out, can get this rolling. Please feel free to include the request for a review in this initial follow-up, so if the results from your efforts are positive, they can then post something nice about your business. However, if you expect anything but a great review, you may also consider waiting until after the survey or phone call is completed, and then ask for the review. 
Is Your Best Good Enough? Your pre-project & mid-project customer service practices can set a positive tone for your clients, so when the project itself goes well, the customers are left with nothing but praises for you & your business. Should the unthinkable happen & the project goes less-than as planned, the strength of your customer service can often save you from the dreaded negative review – but not always…
Make Lemonade from the Lemons: When projects go sideways – which happens even to the best of us – and the customers leave a negative review, your next steps will be critical. Every review deserves a response, but this is even more important for a negative review. Rarely in life or in business do we get the opportunity to fix a mistake. But the proper customer follow-up includes finding out what went “wrong,” apologizing for whatever it was, and then asking “how can we make this right by you” can often turn negative reviews into positive ones, and potentially lost customers into loyal repeat customers.
All of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and online advertising can’t overcome a bad reputation. If you want your customers to do a Google search for the “best home services business near me,” and have your business’s name appear in the Google Local Service Ads (LSA’s) at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), You need to pay more attention, and respect, to your company reviews.
 Need some professional assistance in managing your online reviews and reputation? Contact 1SEO’s experts for a free digital marketing assessment today!

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