Running a moving company is mostly about booking high-quality moving leads, expanding your fleet of moving trucks, and hiring well-trained professional movers.
These are all necessary requirements for providing good moving services and enlarging the number of happy customers. But are they always ready to return the favor?
Whenever, for some reason, your clients are not happy with your services, it is very likely that they will go online and leave a negative review about your company.
On the other hand, most of your satisfied customers do not make an effort to positively evaluate your services on the review website. This might be a problem because even a small percentage of unhappy clients may ruin your online reputation and you know that nowadays the Internet is the number one source for researching products and services.
Best-rated long-distance movers understand perfectly well just how important online reputation has become for the growth of their business – after all, it’s no secret that excellent moving company reputation brings in more customers now and will continue to attract new customers in the future.
So, the question we are trying to answer here is how to successfully manage the way your moving company is represented online.
First, let us tell you something about bad moving reviews. If you believe that you can provide the perfect service to everyone and have a portfolio of 100% satisfied customers, you are fooling yourself.
There will always be someone to complain. It might be about something you did or something you didn’t, but people are different and you cannot make all of them happy.
Therefore, if you hope for a totally positive moving reviews rate… well, just forget about it. The important thing is what you do when you get a negative review and here is our expert advice
How to handle negative moving reviews
Step 1. Claim your company’s profile
Claim the profile of your moving company on all review websites, where it is listed. This way, you will have the chance to manage your online reputation by using the options such sites offer for responding to moving reviews, disputing moving reviews, and contacting reviewers.
Step 2. Update your company information
Carefully update your company information on all review websites. Let your reviewers know that they are really reviewing your company, and not a different one.
Reviews are often submitted to the wrong company profile and you definitely want to avoid this. Check the information provided by the reviewer. Carefully inspect the “from” and “to” locations of the house move in the review as it might not cover your area of operation.
If your services cover the area of NY, for example, and you get a review from someone who moved within IL, then it is almost sure that this is not a client of yours, and most likely there is a moving company in IL with the same or similar name that the review refers to.
However, if that is the case, contact the reviews website immediately, write a company response (if possible), and explain the situation so that the wrongly posted review can be removed or transferred to the correct company profile.
Step 3. Respond to moving reviews
Always write company responses to moving reviews. Especially bad ones. This shows that you care about your customers. Even more, you might find that the reviewer is willing to remove his or her review if a proper apology or settlement is provided by the moving company.
Step 4. Check the reviewer’s personal information
Check the reviewer’s personal information: mostly their name and email address.
Compare them to your clients’ database and see if you ever had a client with such a name and email address. If not – try to dispute the review stating that you never had a customer under that name and again, if possible, write a company response to explain the situation.
However, keep in mind that not all people like to share personal details on the web, so after all, it could be a real client of yours who signed a review using a different name and email address.
Step 5. Read the Review Dispute terms and conditions
Read carefully the Review Dispute terms and conditions so that you know exactly what to do when you want to question the validity of a review. This might help you get the review removed.
Please keep in mind that not all reviews can be disputed, or there may be special terms to do that.
Step 6. Contact the reviewer
Contact the reviewer via the moving reviews website and try to reach an agreement that will lead to the reviewer removing the review. Unsatisfied customers often tend to withdraw their negative comments if they get compensated for the unpleasant moving experience.
Step 7. Don’t push it
Don’t push it. If there is a bad review about your company that you cannot do anything about, do not despair.
As we stated at the beginning of this article, there is no chance of having a 100% positive reputation in this business. The best thing you can do is try to amend the situation with a handful of positive reviews, which leads us to the next set of tips.
Constantine, I loved your article. One thing I also learned is to try to avoid having the customers write a review while they are at your service location. Google will often recognize the IP address where the review is coming from and think it is you writing your own review!