In the jewelry business, reputation is everything. As you expand your business online, are you doing enough to protect your reputation in the world “wild” web? You need to be certain that the same high standards you apply to your store are being applied to your online business.
In Small Business Trends’ “Top 10 Ways to Save Your Online Reputation in 2009,” Janet Meiners Thaeler offers of-the-moment insight on how your online reputation can be fragile -- with web features like negative customer reviews that spread quickly and can live online for years. “Today one angry customer can tarnish a company’s reputation for years,” she writes.
Here are some of her top tips to help you proactively protect your jewelry-business reputation online:
- Easy Contact: Make it easy for customers to contact you. This is a topic we’ve brought up before (“Drive Online Visitors to Your Off-Line Location”), but it’s worth repeating. Your website should make it easier for customers to reach you, not more difficult.
- Promote Policies: Clearly explain your policies – returns, guarantees, etc. – at your website, and make the page that has them featured easy for website visitors to find.
- Get Good Reviews: Every customer interaction should create a positive experience for the customer. Whether you feature a comment section at your website or have review sites on which you want your store featured, you can ask customers who’ve recently shopped with your store to review you. For example, if you email customers as a service or sales follow-up, you can include links to review sites in your messaging and ask customers to leave a positive review online. Just be aware that you cannot reward people for leaving a review.
- Extra Tip: Create small notes to include with a completed purchase that ask customers to review their positive experience of your store at specific websites.
- Follow Your Company Online: Tracking the references to your company online is easier than you think. You can track what is being said about your store and where your store is getting press with a “news alert”. Google Alerts is one web-based keyword-tracking system that allows you to enter in keywords – like your company name – to receive regular email alerts when those keywords are used in an online article, blog, or website. You can also search references to your company at the ever-growing, and popular, social-networking website Twitter.com, by going to http://search.twitter.com.
- Extra Tip: If you are a single-store operation, you may want to include your location in the Keyword searches along with your company name.
- Extra Tip: Be Aware of Online Rating Policies. Consumer review and rating websites have varying policies on how their ratings are determined. For example, eyeonjewels.com, an online jewelry store directory, rates jewelry stores on a 1- to 5-star scale. However, stores without any actual consumer reviews automatically receive a 3-star rating. Therefore, customers who don’t understand how the ratings are determined, may make a decision to visit or not visit your store based on these ratings. It's a smart business policy to review these sites carefully and request to be removed, if you don't like they way the evaluate stores and determine ratings.
- Quick Response: To prepare for negative reviews or angry customer feedback, you need to decide who will respond to the negative reviews and how they will be handled. That person should then respond quickly to potential problems or customer concerns.
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