Last week week we talked about the advantages of using local search for advertising a body shop, with particular attention focused on Google Places. The other two search engines, Bing and Yahoo, have a growing reach and are more than capable of providing businesses with visitors to their websites. There's alot of overlap between the three search engines and their local search programs. One such feature for local search is the ability for customers to comment and/or review the business in question. Lets take some time to talk about the advantages and disadvantages for a business to let previous customers comment on their services.

Customer commenting can be a double-edged sword for businesses. A body shop manager that uses Web-Est once said to me that, "If I create a good experience for my customer and their expectations are met or exceeded, they'll probably tell 5 friends about us. If they're expectations and experience with our business fails to meet expectations, they'll probably tell 15 friends about us." Commenting platforms on websites or on the local search engine programs are one of the places they can go to express that enthusiasm or frustration. Before you convince yourself of how terrible the idea is to open your business up to someone's frustrations, lets consider a couple things.

1. How many good comments are there compared to bad comments?
Several multi-billion dollar companies permit their customers to rate their products. Companies like Amazon, Best Buy, Dell and Circuit City enable a customer approval/disapproval feature to obtain feedback. I'm sure they all have a decent number of negative comments, given their customer base. But how many comments do you think they have that are positive? I'd be willing to bet that it is much larger than the negative experiences. And what do you think that ratio of good comments are to bad? 50 to 1? 100 to 1? Hard to say, but my point is that if you're a profitable, reputable business in good standing with the community, then you probably have a much higher percentage of good reviews than bad. A bad apple doesn't always spoil a bunch.

2. The credibility of the commenter.
Search engines recently added an excellent feature to help businesses guard against deliberately negative people who relentlessly comment with anger. Search engines now require commenters to log in to make comments on a business page. In doing so, the search engine collects a "commenting history" report of the commenter. This permits all visitors to view the profile of commenters, allowing them to see how they've commented on other pages in the past. So if someone writes a negative review on your business page, and they have a history of doing that, then other viewers can see it, and they're likely to look more like someone with a chip on their shoulder than someone with an objective review of your business.

3. Review ratings
Most programs have review ratings, where visitors can rate the reviews of previous customers. This platform creates the opportunity for visitors to promote positive reviews or legitimize negative views. If anyone writes a negative review of your business, commenters that had different experiences respond by saying it was not a helpful review.

Again, putting your business out there to be reviewed can be a double-egded sword. It has the potential to be great for your business, but it can also open it up for negative reviews. Honestly, the best protection against bad customer experiences is to provide the best possible service your business is able to. Do all that you can to make your business "Customer First" oriented. But the truth is, we're in the Age of the Internet. You have to put your business out there on your own terms, or someone else will go out of there way to label your business on their own terms...which typically isn't a good thing. Local search is a good place to start.

Here are some other thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages to enabling customers to review your business:

Why You Shouldn't be Afraid of Customer Reviews