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5 Secrets to Reputation Management for Home Improvement Companies
Reputation is the cornerstone upon which home improvement companies build their clientele. When a home improvement company focuses on excellence in design and quality, coupled with the best customer service, you’d think it would be simple to build an excellent reputation that speaks to potential new clients. But in the internet age, it’s not always that simple—and the price you pay for just one bad online review could be about 30 new clients. No home improvement company can afford that.
So, what do you do with clients you try to hard to please, but are, in fact, impossible to please? How about internet trolls you’ve never even met? What happens when they post bad reviews? This is why reputation management for home improvement companies is just as important as preventing water damage. Fortunately, Reputation Builder can help in these 5 critical ways:
1. Most Homeowners Care about Online Reviews
About 90 percent of homeowners care about online reviews. In fact, most of them give as much weight to online reviews when looking into home improvement companies as they give to the recommendations of friends and family. Most homeowners thinking about starting a home improvement project go from looking for ideas online straight to the search for a home improvement company online. So, does company have a way to manage the online review process that your potential clients see? Do you have a strategy? What if you discover bad reviews connected to your company that you feel are unjustified? If so, you desperately need a reputation repair for home improvement companies plan, yesterday. Because about 80 percent of potential clients who see bad reviews about your company will move on to the next company within the blink of an eye.
As previously mentioned, you could lose around 30 new clients from just one bad review, particularly if you don’t have a hefty collection of happy reviews to counter it. Sadly, the truth is that you may have 50 clients thrilled with the work you did in their kitchens, bathrooms and everywhere else in the house—but those happy customers are strangely less likely to post positive reviews than the one or two grumpy clients you were never able to satisfy, no matter how hard you worked. No, it isn’t fair. So, how can contractors repair their reputation after a bad review? Fortunately, Reputation Builder has a collection of tools to help you win at reputation repair.
2. Reputation Repair for Home Improvement Companies: Building a Happy Review Collection
The first critical tool to help your business recover and overcome the odd, yet unavoidable bad review here and there is to build a strong, large collection of happy reviews. Research has even narrowed it down to a specific ratio: You need 12 or more positive reviews to counteract 1 negative review. The thinking here is that a potential client who happens upon your online reviews will be able to see, from that ratio, that your quality and customer service record is stellar, but that you had the misfortune of dealing with a client who was just hard to please. Reasonable people understand this.
Reputation Builder gives you a quick, mobile solution for collecting those positive reviews from your happy clients in a number of ways. When you know you’re having a great experience with one of your homeowners, you can collect happy reviews from them via email, text or other online formats, all through one simple interface. You can use the format that makes most sense and is easiest for your customers. This empowers you to build a long list of happy customer reviews so that when that one unhappy customer comes along, it won’t make a dent in your ability to project the right message to other potential clients. This is the very first step in reputation repair for home improvement companies like yours.
I feel awesome about my experience with ReputationBuilder. It is an easy to use and affordable platform for collecting reviews and managing my online reputation. And, it's very affordable for the many, many features that the platform includes.
Stephen S.
3. Reputation Defender Services for Home Improvement Businesses: Nip Negativity in the Bud
Even if you are collecting an impressive library of positive reviews, if you’re like most people, those negative reviews still get on your nerves. It’s especially problematic when a troll or someone from the competition posts a nasty review or comment that has nothing to do with an actual job or any personal interaction. Sadly, there are people who get their jollies just from being mean to people. So, what can you do to reduce those situations? What’s even more frustrating for home improvement companies is that good contractors can get a tainted reputation from court cases and the door-to-door scams of really bad contractors out there—just because you’re a home improvement contractor. This is why potential customers are so picky when they’re looking through online reviews!
So, Get Feedback First!
While it’s not entirely possible to stop trolls, Reputation builder gives you powerful reputation defender services that can actually reduce the number of negative reviews that leak out onto the internet while simultaneously boosting the number of good reviews you collect. Reputation Builder gives you the “Feedback First” feature, which empowers you to collect feedback from a client “in the moment”, while you’re with a client. That way, you can see if a client is unhappy and proactively work with them to improve their experience before they’re ever upset enough to post a negative review. This feature has the happy added benefit of helping you go the extra mile with customer service, which can help you inspire them to post a great review instead.
These two-pronged reputation defender services for home improvement businesses can significantly improve the perception potential clients have when they see your online reviews.
So, what do you do when real trolls strike? You can ignore them, report them to the management of the online review service, and you can keep collecting positive reviews with Reputation Builder to drown them out. Whatever you do, don’t lose your cool and just keep focusing on delighting your clients.
4. No Reputation is a Bad Reputation for Home Improvement Companies
So, what happens if your home improvement company has no online presence? No negative reviews, no positive reviews—nothing at all. Since homeowners are looking for information online, if they don’t find your presence there in some way, you run the risk of invisibility or the perception that you haven’t been around long enough to have much experience or expertise—two of the most important things homeowners want in a home improvement contractor.
This is why your company’s survival really depends on taking the proactive path toward reputation management for home improvement companies. Because even if you’ve been delighting customers for 20 years, if potential customers can’t see that, they have no information to prove this.
In a related note, Reputation Builder will actually help you boost your overall SEO footprint online. The more online reviews you collect, the more Google and Bing have to index, and the higher you’ll come up in the search rankings. That means more clients will find you and you’ll be more competitive in your area.
5. Online Reviews are Like Free Marketing Materials
By using the Feedback First function within Reputation Builder, you are actually allowing your happy clients to create and build your online marketing materials for you. And what better way to tell potential clients your story than to let happy customers do it? People care about those positive reviews and make purchasing decisions based on those reviews to a large degree.