More and more people turn to online reviews to decide what products they want to buy. If your company has excellent ratings, it gives you a great advantage for attracting customers and driving purchases. Negative reviews have the opposite effect. What can you do to improve your company’s online reputation and get top reviews all the time?

Avoid Paying for Reviews

Offering customers something in exchange for leaving positive reviews is actually counterproductive to boosting your reputation. It may be against the law, and review sites such as Yelp or Facebook can eliminate positive ratings or flag your account if they discover this type of review tampering.

Prompt Customer Reviews

Getting people to leave positive reviews isn’t as difficult as you may think. Happy customers often leave a nice review if requested. This can be as simple as an online prompt that pops up after purchases that asks for a star rating. Your employees can also ask happy buyers if they’re willing to write a small review on one of your store’s social media sites. Above all, make the review process simple and fast. It’s easier to obtain excellent reviews if leaving them doesn’t take much time for customers.

Make Sure Your Customers Always Have a Positive Experience

When people have an amazing experience, they’re often happy to offer positive reviews of your company. This encompasses everything from product quality and shipping to overall prices and wait-time. Customer service has a huge impact on reviews, so you also want to focus on delivering incredible service every time.

Negative reviews aren’t necessarily a bad thing, because they give you feedback about ways you can improve. Take this information seriously. However, it’s better to receive this feedback through surveys and questionnaires following purchases. That way the majority of your reviews (which influence your online reputation) will be positive.

Deal With Upset Customers Immediately

Gone are the days when you could shrug off upset customers without too much damage to your reputation. Now that reviews have such a huge impact on other potential buyers, it’s essential to do your best to reduce negative reviews. True, it’s virtually impossible to get rid of negative reviews completely, but if you’re doing things right, there should be a strong number of positive ratings to give you an amazing reputation.

Acknowledge the things that make clients irritated and try hard to correct the problem right away. In many cases, following the principle that “the customer is always right” helps to smooth things out significantly.

Taking the time to treat customers right is the secret to getting a great online reputation. Recent reviews count extra, so make sure great customer service is 24/7, not just a one-time thing.