If there are things in the world today that are 2-edged swords, online reviews would rank very highly on the risk. Just like online reviews can make your company, online reviews can also mar your company. A lot of company that are accruing a lot of negative reviews online would soon find themselves changing names and trying to remove every trace of the old name from their company or packing up. This is because more people are getting to know the importance of reading reviews before patronizing a company in recent times and they are doing it religiously. Here are some of the ways online reviews can be a death sentence to a company.
Poor ratings
For a lot of people, when they want to patronize a company, they either have times to read reviews or they don’t. For those that don’t have time to read reviews, all they just look at is your ratings. How many stars do you have? If it is less than 4.8-stars or at the very least, 4.5-stars, they move on to one of your competitors in a bid to find which of them have over the star ratings they have decided would be their minimum. Furthermore, some of those that have time to read reviews will also only read reviews of companies that have a very high rating. They would not want to waste their time on those with low ratings since they know they would not want to patronize such companies. Thus, poor online reviews would give you poor ratings, which will chase away prospective customers at first glance and that could mean a death sentence for your company.
Negative comments
Another way online reviews can nail your company is that you are going to get a lot of negative comments. Thus, for those that would go further to read the reviews that other customers have left for you, they would find a lot of negative reviews. That will be a turn-off for virtually all your prospective customers and you could lose all of them. By the time about 90 per cent of your prospective customers are turned back because they decided to read reviews first only to find out that you could disappoint them like you have disappointed others, the remaining 10 per cent that might not check the reviews or decide to patronize you irrespective would not be able to sustain your company for the long run. That might be a death sentence for your company. You could further sign the death sentence yourself if you still cannot satisfy the 10 per cent that decided to patronize you as they would also leave negative reviews and never come back.
No recommendations online and offline
A lot of people look for recommendations before patronizing companies, especially online. Recommendations are sometimes one of the feature people fill when they are leaving reviews. When nobody is recommending you or only 5 per cent is recommending you while the other 95 per cent comments do not recommend you, you can be sure that your company is as good as dead. Even with 30 per cent not recommending you to 70 per cent recommending you, you could still have a problem. Let alone if the percentage not recommending you is more than 50 per cent.
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