Google Reviews = Online Reputation. Reviews are crucial as new potential customers will go to Google and search your company brand name before deciding whether to buy.
Here’s the typical customer journey when they are online:
Phase 1:
Customers found your company on Google / FB / IG / Tiktok / Signage
Phase 2:
Enters the consideration phase, they might give you their contact details, but they are still considering.
Phase 3 (decision):
Customers then search for your brand name and read the Google Reviews. They will then decide whether to buy.
Google Reviews Ratings
Next we will go deeper and breakdown the Google Reviews in different scenario and ratings:
Let’s start from the top and work our way down:
Scenario 1: Ratings ranging from 4.7 to 5
While 5/5 looks good on paper, a 4.9/5 rating would be the better rating as it shows that your company is not 100% perfect and 4.9 looks more authentic compared to hundreds of full perfect 5 star reviews.
A full 5/5 may indicate to customers that the brand might have incentivised the review, hence not so genuine, while 4.9 indicates that a large majority of customers had a good experience.
Another tip is to get your existing customers to write the review and upload photos, making the review look friendly and genuine.
The next range is 4.7 and 4.8. While the rating is still high, this will make certain customers sort the reviews and read some of the low ratings. The key here is to reply the 1 star reviews and explain the situation from your perspective so the reader can then make their own judgement.
Scenario 2: Rating ranging from 4.0 to 4.6
With 4.0 to 4.6, customers will read the reviews and look for the negative ones to see if there are any red flags that they should know as an outsider.
If the negative reviews are one-liners, customers will give you the benefit of the doubt and the perception is neutral.
However, if there are many 1 star with “karangan” type of reviews and without reply from you, the reader will automatically assume it’s the company’s fault.
There are 3 ways to go about this:
1: Report the review to Google and explain why this 1 star is unfair. Based on experience, your chances of getting this reverse only has a 20% chance.
2: Call the reviewer personally and try to fix the issue offline. This is usually the best method and I have seen majority of 1 star reviews removed after this personalised outreach to the customer.
3: If 1 and 2 doesn’t work, you can reply the review as the company and share things from your perspective, so the reader knows it may not be your fault.
Scenario 3: Rating Below 4.0
If the rating is below 4.0, I would suggest to minimize the marketing budget and put more effort into increasing the reviews first.
As spending more money on marketing may result in a leaky bucket where the marketing is not effective as the negative reviews would make customrs stay away, even if they have already submitted their contact details.
Scenario 4: Rating 4.7 to 5 but less than 10 total number of reviews
While the rating might look good in this scenario, customers might think that your brand is new or there are not many customers yet.
Action Steps for Increasing Google Reviews:
1: Request existing happy customers to leave their feedback on Google. This can be done with or without incentive.
2: Have monthly or quarterly monitoring of reviews rating with your team.
3: Reply “karangan” type of negative reviews and show your company’s perspective
