Zirogiannis - A Guide to Addressing Yelp Complaints for Business Owners

A Guide to Addressing YELP Complaints for Business Owners

By Marc Zirogiannis

Zirogiannis, Marc

A Guide to Addressing YELP Complaints for Business Owners

ISBN#: 978-1-365-68614-6

COPYRIGHT 2017 by Red Flag Advisors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission of the author.

Inquiries or additional information contact:

Marc A. Zirogiannis

PO Box 853

Valley Stream, NY 11580

Email:

Marc Zirogiannis holds a B.A. from Long Island University and a Juris Doctor from Hofstra Universitys School of Law. Mr. Zirogiannis is a world renowned Business Development Consultant. Mr. Zirogiannis has practiced the martial arts for over 25 years and earned a 2nd Dan under the supervision of Grandmaster Yeon Hwan Park in Levittown, New York. He has published several prior books on a variety of subject material, and is currently the Editor of Taekwondo Life Magazine , an international Tae Kwon Do print publication. He lectures on a variety of topics, including suicide prevention, business development, and matters of the martial arts.

There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. - Sam Walton

After spending over 25 years consulting and speaking with, literally, hundreds of successful small business owners I have seen a dramatic change in the way consumers approach various business experiences in the modern era. The popularization of the Internet and the smart phone now bring information to the immediate fingertips of consumers all over the world.

Consumers now have the ability to investigate a business at little or no cost before patronizing it and to immediately share their own personal experiences with fellow, interested consumers. This makes consumers more powerful partners n the business world than ever before.

If Sam Walton was right, and the customer is the only boss in the marketplace, they now have the ability to impact and influence businesses on a scale and with the immediacy never previously conceived of. The advent of YELP, the online business directory and customer review website personifies this concept better than any in the modern business era.

YELP offers consumers the ability to quickly, at no charge, find local businesses in the category they are seeking products or services for. It offers them all the relevant directory information about business in a geographic search area. It provides all the contact information on those businesses, including phone numbers and website information. Directions with a click make the website, particularly, useful. Mostly importantly, most importantly for this discussion, it offers a detailed summary of other customer experiences with that business, whether good or bad.

New customers searching for this business cannot avoid being drawn to the summary of reviews left for the business they are seeking and to be lead to the more detailed reviews posted by people similarly situated to the them. This is a powerful tool in the information age.

For business owners, they have no choice whether their business is listed or not. YELP is not a voluntary listing service. YELP verifies the existence of a business entity and posts the information for consumers to become aware of. Reviews begin to be posted based upon customer experience and business owners cannot opt out of the service for fear that negative reviews will hurt their business reputation. They cannot steer potential customers away from YELP because it is currently so entrenched in the consumer mindset. They cannot force the outcome of customer reviews or manipulate the results to the outcome they are hoping to achieve. YELPs computer algorithms filter out the fake reviews and retain the legitimate ones, whether good or bad.

These factors make YELP the most significant customer review and business directory in the world. They are well aware of their power and they fight hard to preserve the integrity of their system of legitimacy.

So what is a business owner to do? The only sensible thing a 21 st Century business owner can do to deal with the proliferation and the presence of YELP as a modern component of their business operations is to understand how YELP works and to further understand how to respond to negative reviews posted on the website. A failure to do this is modern times is a failure of business, for sure.

In my discussions with business owners I am amazed at how few understand the impact of YELP, and similar websites. More importantly, even fewer have any idea how to address the comments posted on the site, whether to the poster or in their business operations. Many do not even respond, at all. This neglect, for some is out of a lack of understanding of the need to. For others, it stems from a lack of knowledge that they are able to.

The goal of this work is to introduce the modern business owner to the impact of YELP on their business and to create a simple, readable, understandable guide to managing the negative reviews.

As a business owner if you treat customer review response and management as an integrated part of your business operations and you follow the steps outlined in this work you will not only find that the anxiety of answering responses disappears but rather that you welcome the information contained in ongoing customer feedback as a valuable asset in business and operation improvement.

(From YELPs website)

Yelp was founded in 2004 by the founders of PayPal to help people find local businesses like dentists, hair stylists and mechanics.

Yelp had a monthly average of 25 million unique visitors who visited Yelp via the Yelp app and 72 million unique visitors who visited Yelp via mobile web in Q3 2016.*

Yelpers have written more than 115 million reviews by the end of Q3 2016

Yelp makes money by selling ads to local businesses - youll see these clearly labeled "Yelp Ads" around the site.

Paying advertisers can never change or re-order their reviews.

Yelp uses automated software to recommend the most helpful and reliable reviews for the Yelp community among the millions we get. The software looks at dozens of different signals, including various measures of quality, reliability, and activity on Yelp. The process has nothing to do with whether a business advertises on Yelp or not. Learn more here.

The Local Yelp brings locals updates on the latest business openings & other happenings.

* Source: Users as measured by Google Analytics

Here you will find the essential guidelines for addressing reviews posted by customers on your YELP business listing. Before doing anything you should take a deep breath and read this material carefully several times. Once you have fully digested the contents and the procedural hints to answering you can begin the process of managing these negative reviews.

Read the entire complaint before doing anything -

For a negative review to have any value at all it is essential that a business owner or manager fully understand the contents of the review. Glancing over the review to glean the essence and salient points is an understandable way to get a sense of the issues. It is not, however, definitive or dispositive in understanding how to respond to the complaint- both in terms of a written response to the complainant and in terms of an operational response.

After skimming the review once you should read it thoroughly 2-3 times before doing anything. Try reading it objectively, without mentally formulating a defense as you are reading. Read it as if you are an objective fact finder trying to gather the facts for an investigative report. This takes self-control and objectivity. It is not easy but it is essential to success in formulating the correct action plan.