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A famous quote from Warren Buffett goes, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
The same advice applies to businesses that operate online. However, tracking your reputation is generally easier since you can actually see what people are saying about your company, even from current and ex-employees. Reviews, ratings, news articles, blog posts, and press releases are just a few example mediums your current and past clients are writing through to your prospective and future customers. These sources of information can be tracked down and treated since all of the data is available digitally.
In general, treat your clientele and employees right and they will reward you with more referring business; otherwise, poor customer service will slowly bring down your company.
So what are some things you can do right now to maintain your clean image online?
1) For starters, search for your company name in Google or Bing. You’ll see a list of search results – skim through the listings and click on the links to pages where people may be talking about your company or products/services. Popular websites you may find this information vary in nature; you can hear what others are saying to their social networks via Facebook or Twitter, or through online retailers like Amazon.com or eBay.com. If you own a local business or restaurant, Yelp and CitySearch can provide you tons of insight on what you’re doing right and wrong. If you want to see what your employees are writing about you and your company, find out on employee reviews sites such as GlassDoor.com.
2) Clean up your mess. Once you determine popular websites people post and review you on, find out how you can fix the problem ASAP. If you’re late to the game, you may have some bad reviews that cannot be remedied. Whether your company is old or new, bad reviews need immediate attention and some review websites allow for business owners to respond to complaints. For the ones that don’t, you’ll just have to eat it, take the criticism and learn from the mistakes so it doesn’t happen again.
3) Provide accessible customer support. You could have the best product or service around, but if something goes wrong and there is no way to reach you, or worse, your staff provides terrible customer experiences, then you’ll have a difficult time growing your business. Provide phone lines, email support, live chat, and even use Facebook and Twitter to deliver that customer support. The quicker and friendlier you can accomplish that, the more loyal your customers will be and more likely to refer their friends and family to you.
As simple it may seem, many online companies have a difficult time in this department. The good news is, if you want to get ahead of most of your competitors, providing excellent customer service will go a long way.
