How to deal with customer complaints?

Start by understanding who your reviewers are and why they're writing their reviews. This will give you clarity, showing you how to respond. If they're unhappy, make things right. If they're misguided, share the facts. If they're abusive, monitor but do not engage with their complaints.

Common ways to handle customer complaints?

Common approaches include: Apologizing and owning mistakes, take the conversation offline, look for a win/win solution to the customer's problem. While these are common approaches to customer complaints, they're not always the best.

What are the 5 steps to handling a customer complaint?

Here are several approaches you can take: Ask for more information. Gather intel from customers. Apologize and look for opportunities to make things right. Offer incentives to compensate customers for the loss of their time and money. Ask customers for feedback or updates to their review.

What is the best way to respond to a customer complaint?

Here are some actionable steps you can take to respond to your customer complaints. (1.) Listen to your reviewer, (2.) be transparent, (3.) cite your sources, (4.) be timely, (5.) watch your tone, (6.) offer next steps, (7.) escalate to management, (8.) apply the 80/20 rule.

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New Feature: Tag Testimonial Widgets

May 30, 2017

Using GetFiveStars to collect customer feedback and testimonials provides a great way to understand customer sentiment and to build out content for a strong testimonial page or a location landing page on your own website using our Testimonial Widget.

Now it can also be used to build out compelling content for your product, service, service area or staff pages as well with our latest feature addition of custom Testimonial Widgets using tags.

Tag Testimonial Widget

When a business location receives feedback from a customer, they can now apply custom tags with each customer. These tags will give you the ability to create unique widget codes to place a group of custom testimonials on the webpage relevant to their purchase.

For example if you provided carpeting and flooring in Austin and Round Rock, TX (a suburb of Austin) you could have tags for each type of service or city serviced. You would then be able to create custom Testimonial Widgets that included unique testimonials from your carpeting customers in Round Rock or your wood flooring customers in Austin.

The tagging is flexible and allows simple or more complex groupings of testimonials to be placed on the relevant webpages. It’s a great way to pair relevant customer comments with your specific service, products or areas served.

The Benefits Of Tagging

The widget includes rich snippet review notation so those pages will have an opportunity to show in Google search with review stars. Review stars in the search results increase searcher click through rates even on pages that are lower in the search results. Google has reported this to be anywhere from a 10% to 20% increase in click through rates.

But the value of page specific testimonials goes beyond just enhancing your search results. By putting actual customer feedback on the webpage relevant to a searcher’s interest, you can increase conversions of your website visitors.

In recent research by BrightLocal having review content on landing pages increased the perception of trustworthiness and more importantly increased the likelihood that the consumer would contact the business by a significant amount.

How It Works

There are three steps to the process; 1- adding tags to the customer feedback and 2- generating the custom tag testimonial widget and 3- placing the Tag Testimonial Widget on the page you want it to appear on.

You can add tags directly upon upload of the customer spreadsheet, from the API or directly in the customer profile. The example below shows adding tags to a customer’s feedback.

Once the tags have been added, head over to the testimonial widget (Settings > Testimonial Widget). The first step is to open the General Testimonial Widget Embed Code and let us know the URL of your testimonial page and the anchor text you would like to use in your Tag Testimonial Widget to link to the testimonial page. Google requires that your location’s full set of testimonials be linked from the aggregate schema we use in the widget.

Then open the Tag Testimonial Widget & Badge Embed Code and choose +Create New Widget. This will allow you to name your new widget, define which tags are included and whether you include a link to your feedback form.

Copy the code and place it on the relevant product and service pages. If you are using WordPress be sure to do so, using our WordPress Plugin and you are good to go.

Now your testimonials can be shared on pages for services , products and service areas that they are specific to. Use these custom Testimonial Widgets throughout your site to increase your search visibility AND increase conversions.

Here’s a video walkthrough of the new capabilities:

Mike Blumenthal

Mike Blumenthal is a co-founder of GatherUp and helps oversee our research, industry insight and agency offering. Mike has long been regarded as the foremost expert on local search and Google Maps, earning the nickname “Professor Maps”. Mike also co-founded Local University, which provides small business and agency training in sustainable local search marketing. His motto: All Local All the Time. He writes at his blog and does a twice a week LocalU podcast about Local marketing.

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