Reviews - 2014

2014 is going to be the year that engaging with reviews ceased to be an option. 

Why?

Because of the changes to Google for Business*

Businesses will have an option - but it will look like this:

• Either: Allow the review sites to control your reputation  
• Or: Take control of reviews (and therefore your reputation) yourself

*And Yelp and TripAdvisor and AllAgents and every other review site out there

What strategy should you adopt?

As with everything in business: be proactive and seek out the best solution for your business. If that's our Dialogue system we'll be delighted, but simply sitting on your hands will be too great a risk.

Why?

Because simply 'doing nothing' will run the risk of enabling a tiny minority of dissatisfied customers to control what other potential customers see about your business on the web.

If your Google Business page looks like this...

Resulting in the business looking like this in Google search...

Or this...

Looking like this in Google...

Just one or two negative reviews will have the potential to set a trend that will be hard to reverse.

So - back to your strategy:

If you decide to 'own your reputation' then you can ask your customers to post reviews direct to Google or you can get us to do it for you.

The advantage of using Dialogue 

If you ask customers to post direct you run the risk negatives being posted (remember that an unhappy customer is much more likely to post). If you use Dialogue you will be able to address negatives in private. And you will have lots of lovely verified reviews to show on your own website as well.