New Delhi: In modern relationships, a frenemy is someone who acts as your best friend when they need you and stabs you in the back before you realise it. For businesses whose existence depends on word of mouth, reviews on Reddit, Quora and Google are a frenemy they have to deal with very, very carefully.
No matter how strong the brand is, if you don’t address customer reviews, you risk alienating your customers who anyways have many other choices. No one knows this better than the Buzaglo’s in Scottsdale, Arizona. The strong willed owners of the Amy’s Baking Company stood up to the barrage of negative reviews on Yelp, where people insulted them and their food.
Amy and Samy Bouzaglo got celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay to film their restaurant to prove them wrong. Gordon didn’t think so, and abandoned his work with them after two days. Needless to say, the Bouzaglo’s haven’t yet recovered from this setback.
To avoid such issues, most customer facing businesses have someone keeping an eye on everything spoken about them online. You never know when any random negative comment can snowball into a full-blown outburst of complaints for brands that depend solely on brand equity.
Negative perceptions of the brand can come from anywhere- a tweet, a social media post, a bad experience at the establishment and even by competitors paying for negative reviews to boost their own business.
This has become a recurring problem for review sites, as anyone can post any anonymous review to ruin reputations. Many of them now allow establishments to reply to any review, besides giving people the option to flagging spam reviews.
Even though restaurants and other service establishments do everything they can to enhance and improve their service, customers misusing reviews for additional gain will always remain a problem restaurants and hotels have to deal with.
They have accepted the fact that they cannot keep everyone happy, and that they have to walk a fine line between offering the best service and managing negative reviews from opportunistic people.
Brands also know that managing customer expectations is no easy task, as not all customer experiences would be about the brand, but something that could have happened there that is beyond their control.
Last week, a techie from Pune was searching for a nearby gym when he shared a review that caught his eye.
was looking for a good gym in my area and saw this review 😭 pic.twitter.com/L7lnNZ38eO
— Soham (@king26_sk) November 28, 2024
What about the gym in question? Well, they haven’t commented anything on the matter yet, but this whole issue has tarnished their reputation, where people are now highlighting how this chain of gyms has wrecked friendships and relationships, in equal measure. The review posted has also been taken down, apparently as a damage control measure.
No brand is immune to such unforeseen events. All it takes is one comment, review or vlog to malign the reputation and if not addressed on time, it can cause irreplaceable damage. Even though positive reviews do help get customers in the door, encouraging reviews has been a tricky affair, especially for brands looking to boost sales. Many do encourage reviews, but they know that a bad one could spoil all the reputation they have built over time. No wonder, many brands maintain a cautious approach when encouraging reviews.
