As an internet marketing agency owner, I was confronted just recently with an issue of one of my customer receiving bad review on their Google Local page. Basically, the customer’s quarrel was that he (lets call him Matt) had booked the quote for an air conditioning installation but nobody turned up.
My customer did their due diligence and looked up their records and found that the customer had been contacted at the time on the number provided at which a lady had answered and advised that they already have an air conditioner! So, to find out why Matt didn’t put in another call instead of posting this bad review, a call was made to him to which he responded in a rude and abrupt manner.
Now, this comment looked suspect to me however there is really no way to verify whether Matt works for a competitor, i.e. there is some sort of conflict of interest or he is genuinely unhappy and this is just a case of misunderstanding. Since my customer had already done everything in their power, it was up to me to try and correct this through Google.
Since something like this hadn’t happened to any of my customers before, I decided to investigate a little more with Google as to what can be done about this. I expected that the owner of the business, in this case my customer would be able to have a right of reply to this comment so everyone can see it and make up their mind.
Luckily, this was the case. Only one thing you need to ensure about your Google local listing is that you are the verified owner of your Google Places page. Google has a very good article that gives you guidelines as to the best way to respond to a comment or a review where you as the owner feel you have been hard done by. Click here to find out how to properly respond to a review of your business.
Since we were the verified owners of the page already, we were able to log on to our Google account and create a reply to this, as it happens – bad review (unreasonable in our opinion). It goes without saying that to keep the high reputation of the business, every business owner ought to be as responsive as possible as it is the customer service and quality that will distinguish good from bad businesses and in the end draw in ever more customers.
