The Power of a Review….

OK, I’ll be honest; we may have almost gone too far pushing for reviews from our customers.  A good review can make us feel like heroes or at the same time a moment later, zeros.  After all, it is how people think or perceive us right?  So, how much power should customer reviews have?

First we need to know where those reviews are going to be seen!  Are they going to our website, going to post to Facebook, or are they simply there for our betterment and not seen by anyone else?  These are questions that require answers before using reviews for any discussions regarding letting people go based on a review or reviews!

All reviews are important, because they can tell a tale of how our customers perceived our service or services.  And they all deserve to be given some degree of significance when reading them.  However, many reviews can be meant to hurt, some even come from people we have never seen and again are meant to discredit the specific business.  But some are real and legitimate and deserve to be followed up on to make sure that if we failed a customer, there is a procedure or process that goes into place to correct what went wrong.  Can we write a process or procedure to fit every situation?  Absolutely not, because if we could do that we would no longer need people to run our facilities, we could have monkeys do it because there would be a process or procedure for everything needed, and no real thought process would be involved.  So just like training our service staff through phone call reviewing, reviews should be used to train.

One of the big issues we see from time to time is when a customer writes a bad review, we (shop owners) use it to chastise to the point that the mistake becomes almost a repetitive issue.  I have seen many cases where the mistake propagates such a harsh reaction from the owners that the person who made it becomes afraid of making another so much that they actually create more issues and more mistakes.  This is normally because their focus can become so centered on not making mistakes that they lose sight of everything else around them.  Please understand, we are not talking about incompetent mistakes, we are normally talking about training mistakes or simply that something got by someone…….it happens, they’re called mistakes!!  Now even incompetence could simply require training as well, but we have all seen good to great employees hit a rut and someone overreact to that rut…..and fire that employee.

Some employees will need to be fired or let go, and sometimes it is the review process that could point that out to us.  Someone has been flying under the radar and a couple reviews gone wrong could bring that to our attention, but even then we have to weigh the good against the bad and determine their fate after this process.  Look at how many people have given bad reviews out of how many people have been in, versus how many total reviews we have had.  All those should factor into how much relevance we give them.  If we are only getting a couple reviews per hundred customers, and we are getting a bad one every 20 or 30 reviews should those be given more priority than us getting 20 plus for every couple hundred customers?  The short answer here is that there may be no correlation at all, but every facility is different and you may need to spend some real time making sure that your decision to terminate an employee was not solely based on a review.

And what about a price complaint review?  If we are known as a top shop, we are probably also known as an expensive one.  If we have to pay for and maintain not only the best Technicians in the area, but the best equipment as well, we had better be charging for that investment.  So how can we compare a price driven review to a poor workmanship one?  Short answer….we can’t and yet, I see it happen all the time. Be careful in what you glean from reviews, be careful how much weight you give them and be careful not to throw away a good employee that you may have short circuited through harsh reactions…….or eventually you may not have any staffing to worry about relative to a bad review!

If you need help with your business and want to see and feel the successes you expected when you opened your doors, give us a call at:

The ACT Group, 805-444-2598 or visit our website for more information www.automotivecoachingandtraining.com