Week 2 Part A: Business & Consumers: Communication and Reviews

 

    Communicating with businesses has certainly changed over the years.  In many ways, I feel fortunate as a consumer to be old enough to understand and appreciate how businesses communicated before the internet.  As a young adult in the early 1990’s, the internet was still in its experimental infancy and certainly was not available to the average consumer to look up particulars such as menu items, pricing, or customer reviews.  If I wanted to impress a young lady by taking her to a nice restaurant, I inevitably would have to ask friends and family if they had any suggestions.  Even if they did, I would still most likely have to call the restaurant on the landline phone (hopefully the restaurant was open during the pre-dinner hours) and ask them about current menu items, pricing, and reservations.  While there might have been several restaurants to choose from, going through the manual effort of calling all those restaurants a head of time certainly became time-consuming and certainly lacked any high level of certainty in regards to quality.  Basically, going out to a nice restaurant before the internet was a bit of a gamble, so hopefully friends and family actually had solid recommendations.  Back then, restaurants had to entice new clients the old-fashioned way through newspaper advertisements, maybe TV commercials, but mostly through word of mouth.

    Fast forward a couple decades, and picking a nice restaurant is certainly a whole different experience all together today.  Between Yelp, Google reviews, Facebook comments and a multitude of other social media and various foodie apps such as OpenTable, picking a nice restaurant is simple as a few typed words or simply asking “Siri – find nice restaurants near me with 4 or more stars”, and inevitably you will get a narrowed down list of at least a few nice places to pick from.  And almost just as quickly you can review the menu, learn about pricing, browse the latest reviews, and make reservations…all in just a few clicks on the smartphone.

    However, having a restaurant, or any business for that matter, open to public review and critique on the internet can definitely be a double-edge sword.  If the business website is aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, offers relevant information, and provides links to hundreds of positive customer reviews it can certainly help to drive in new business.  Conversely, if a business website leaves the potential customer frustrated or leads them to a list of negative reviews, the customer is almost certainly going to look elsewhere if other options are available.

    In my experience, I have found that there is no such thing as a perfect business.  The latest movie might win 9 Oscars but will inevitably still get at least some bad reviews.  Restaurants, grocery stores, car repair shops, online service providers, and literally just about every other business out there will at some point have bad reviews no matter how good they are or what the 99% of other positive comments might say about them.  In my business review/comment browsing experience, for whatever the product or service might be, I like to notice how the majority of people review and comment and I tend to ignore the few naysayers.  Additionally, I would much rather trust in a business that has a larger volume of reviews/comments and maybe a less than perfect score than a business that has 5 stars with only just a handful of reviews. What really impresses me, and I think really sets some businesses apart, are those that take the time to publicly comment and respond to their negative reviews to address/fix whatever the problem might have been…these are the types of reviews that really drive me towards being a customer of that business.

    So, if we assume that there are quite a number of other consumers out there that use something similar to my customer review methodology, we want to see a lot of reviews and positive comments on a business before we decide to commit as new customers.  Very few of us want to commit to something new that has limited reviews/comments, especially if we have multiple other choices that do.  I think that one of the biggest challenges, especially for small business just starting out is getting over this hurdle…how do you gain a following without at first having a loyal following?  Even as I type this blog, I am thinking about all the countless small businesses whose products or services that I really enjoyed, that I could have really helped out by taking just a few seconds to leave a positive review.  I think it is important and up to us as consumers to have a proactive role in helping to build up and save the businesses we like by leaving positive reviews and comments.  By staying silent, we only encourage the next shopper to look somewhere else that might have more reviews or positive comments.  In the past I have rarely, if ever, left a negative review or comment (just not my style), but by staying silent I am not at all separating the good from my bad experiences.

    My final take-away after thinking through and writing this blog is that I promise to be a much, much more proactive consumer in the future by leaving positive reviews and comments online for the businesses that deserve them, especially if I want to see those businesses continue to thrive into the future.  I might continue to stay silent on my bad experiences, but I will definitely share my voice more often with my good experiences!  I mean if it was my business, I would want my customers to do the same for me.