With the power and popularity of the internet nowadays, a company’s online reputation can be the make or break of that company – it really is becoming that important.

More and more consumers are searching for that all important ‘confidence factor’ before committing to deal with any type of company, and in particular before paying deposits.

So what is happening out there? Well, say Mr Smith is considering buying a conservatory from me – so he goes to google and searches for ‘conservatoryland reviews’ and gets the following results.

OK, the top natural search result is the ‘big one’ - Review Centre. So Mr Smith clicks on that one and is immediately presented with 22 different independent reviews from consumers that we have dealt with in the past.

Well as you can see, we currently have 18 out of 22 customers on the Review Centre site that would recommend us – not bad, but not great either, so what does this mean and what affect will it have on Mr Smith’s view of our company?

Unfortunately, many consumers do not accept that all companies receive complaints and have dissatisfied customers, but even worse, many will fail to understand just what they are seeing on consumer review sites such as this one and how accurate the overall picture of a company that is being created here actually is.

As we all know, we don’t often hear from satisfied customers but we always hear from the dissatisfied ones. Well it’s the same with review sites, satisfied customers won’t ‘break their necks’ trying to get to the review sites fast enough to leave you a good testimonial – BUT THE DISSATISFIED ONES CERTAINLY WILL!

For example, if you have 100 satisfied customers and 2 dissatisfied customers, what feedback from those customers would you expect? I would guess that you would definitely hear from both dissatisfied customers but you would be lucky to hear from one of the 100 satisfied ones.

So what can we do about it? The first step of course is to endeavour to resolve 100% of customer grievances to prevent them running off to the review sites and slagging your company off – not always achievable with every customer though, so you’ve got to accept that you will get some negative reviews on the web, you’ve just got to keep them to a minimum.

The second step is to encourage your satisfied customers to leave you nice, honest reviews on these sites, but that’s not easy either – you’re asking your customers to sit down, spend their precious time and type a written testimonial about their experiences with your company and not everyone is computer/internet savvy.

I recognise the importance of a company’s online reputation and the threats that can be presented here if ignored and this will undoubtedly get bigger as time goes by.

Therefore I spend a lot of my personal time working on this issue, placing a very high priority on customer satisfaction to help prevent negative publicity and encouraging satisfied customers to publish positive comments about our company on the web.

Even after all this effort, Mr Smith as referred to above, will think that we have around 1 in 5 dissatisfied customers when in fact it is around 1 in 94! So are these review sites really being fair? and is a potential customer left with an accurate view of your company after reading comments about you on the review sites?

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