Reputation & Reviews

How your company handles difficult situations can impact your reputation online and in person. Having mechanisms in place to safeguard and protect that reputation is crucial. 

At Nolan, we use a reputation management company to help us process reviews. 

First, we ask each for a customer review. The review is sent with their invoice. This internal review is based on a universal scoring system called the Net Promoter Score (NPS). It’s done on a scale of zero to ten using questions such as, “What’s the likelihood you’ll refer us to family or friends?” 

• If a customer gives us an NPS of nine or ten, they are directed to Google to post their review publicly. 
• If a customer gives us an eight, I contact the team leader to find out more about that job. 
• If a customer gives us a seven or lower, our team gets in touch with them to find out what we can do for them to generate a more favorable response. Whether or not they give us a second response doesn’t matter. I need them to be happy. 

We’re getting over 70% response rate from our clients. While that leaves 30% unresponsive, we still get feedback from most customers.

Don’t get defensive if you get a negative review. 

In the interim, while you learn more about the job, simply say, “We are working on this,” or “We’re sorry your situation didn’t go well.” Nothing defensive; neutral is okay.

Do not ignore the problems. 

Talk about them internally and discuss how to solve them. Primarily, be ready to make the customer happy. Be on their side and get the team to understand what that means. Never be defensive; rather, be humble and understand that other factors may be at play here. 

Create a system or process for handling problems, then communicate! 

Talk to the customer and do your best to get out of there on a positive note. Move on to the happy customer who’s up next. Reviews build muscle. Do them! See you next week.