Phil Risher tells contractors getting one-star reviews to do two things: find out what's actually broken in your service, then respond publicly to every bad review. Ignoring them signals you don't care, and potential customers see that.
I want you to think about a contractor who's stuck in a rut, and that rut is they keep getting negative or low Google reviews and it's affecting their business as they go forward. They show up to the next quote or estimate and that Google review lands like a brick on their head. What do they need to do differently in their business to change that?
The first thing is, if you keep getting 1-star Google reviews, you need to look at your process and figure out why are people having a bad experience with your service and leaving you a 1-star in the first place. The second thing is if you do get 1-star reviews and you think that they're just barking dogs or annoying people, you got to make sure to respond to the Google review and don't just let it hang out there. The reason is, is because when prospective customers look for your business and they go and read your reviews and they see that 1-star and you haven't responded, it shows them that you probably don't care about customer service. And so if something were to go wrong on their job, they may not select you because they don't know how you treat your customers when things do go bad.
Excellent insight. So an unresponded to 1-star review. Is kind of like guilty as charged.
