4 Surprising Costs of a Bad Review

Customers have ALL the power. Long gone are the days when it was only about brand image and looking better than the competition. In an age when everyone congregates around the social media water cooler and consumers make split second decisions based on what they see on their mobile devices, businesses need their happy customers to preach it—and to convert unhappy customers back into happy ones. Because one—even just one bad review—is too expensive!

1. Grumpy Customers are 3 Times More Likely to Blab than Happy Customers

Which is really unfair if you’ve been making people happy all day and you just happen to get that one grumpy customer the moment your cupcake oven goes on the fritz. But it is what it is. And unfortunately, that one customer is three times more likely to get on Facebook, Twitter or Yelp! and start railing against you until their anger subsides, whether it was entirely your fault or not. They’ll share all that anger with their friends and family, some of whom may feel compelled to share it with their friends and family too!

2. You Need 12 Positive Reviews to Offset That Negative One

Which is unfortunate because those happy customers you’ve been sending on their way are not as likely as the angry customer to post any reviews at all. Sure, they’ll come back. They might mention their great experience to a few friends. But you need to energize at least 12 of those happy campers to come to your aid and post positive reviews of their own in order to make up for that negative one.

3. 80% of People Choose Not to Purchase if They See Negative Reviews

If you translate that into actual people, you lose about 30 new customers at a time from just one negative review—even if someone recommended your product to them in the first place! And if you don’t have a lot of positive reviews coming in to counter the negatives, how many more customers are you potentially losing with each bad review?

4. Google Says: More Stars Get More Clicks

According to the statistics Google’s keeping these days, businesses with three or more stars get 87 percent of all the clicks when people are shopping online. This is why dealing with negative reviews constructively and getting your happy customers to post those 5-star reviews is so critical!

Turning an Unhappy Customer into a Happy Customer is Powerful

You don’t have to let an unhappy customer stay unhappy. In fact, you don’t even have to let negative reviews leak out into the world with Reputation Builder on your side.

Reputation Builder pre-empts the posting of bad reviews, sending them directly to you privately first. This gives you the golden opportunity to personally handle the situation and turn your unhappy customer into a happy customer instead—before that costly negative review ever hits the public.

What’s even better is this: when you positively resolve an unhappy customer’s complaint (before the public has a chance to see it), they are 4-6 times more likely than regular happy customers to post a very positive review afterward! Not only did you have a chance to resolve the concerns and improve your product/service/approach—you’ve gained a customer who is now loyal and is more likely to tell everyone about it!