Better Take Online Reviews Serious

Your Online Reputation: How Parking Companies Can Manage Negative Reviews and Garner Positive Ones

Like it or not, your potential parking customers are using online reviews to decide whether or not to park with you. Reviews at sites like Yelp, Yahoo Local, Insider Pages and Merchant Circle can steer potential customers toward or away from your company. Google+ Local reviews weigh heavily in determining if your facility will be in the Google 7-Pack listings, which are the “balloon” listings that appear prominently when someone searches for parking in your area. If you have no reviews, few reviews or too many negative reviews, people are likely to skip your garage/lot in favor of a well-reviewed one. Even if you don’t look at these reviews, you can bet the success of your business that your potential customers will.

Monitoring Your Online Reputation

The first step in monitoring your online reputation is to go to Google, Yahoo and Bing and search for your facility name. See what comes up on the first three pages, then click on the resulting links to see what’s being said about you. Make a list of all the websites that reference your company. Set up accounts at all the review sites that refer to you.Next, do the same for “<your facility name> reviews.” This should render more actual review listings. Note the default search settings for Google, Yahoo and Bing use predictive search technology to suggest more specific search queries, such as adding “reviews” after the name of certain businesses. The more people who use “reviews” after a business name, the more likely the search engines are to suggest “reviews” as a search modifier. This means it’s inevitable that the word “reviews” will be a suggestion after your company name at some point.

A handy way to monitor your online reputation is to use Google Alerts. Go to Google.com/alerts and create an alert for your facility name in quotation marks. (You’ll need a free Google account.) Start with “all results,” “once a day.” See if anything is being said about your business. You might also set up alerts in your community as well as key employees and major competitors. These may come in handy as well.

What to Do About Negative Reviews

First, take a deep breath and try not to take it too personally. No business can please all people all the time.   Second, most negative reviews are just an opinion. Hopefully, they don't represent a fundamental flaw in your customer-service policies. But if you see a recurring pattern in negative reviews, take action immediately to correct the cause of the problem.  The consequences of ignoring reviews is simply a loss of customers.

Some review sites offer rebuttal opportunities and others don’t. Yelp is one site that lets business owners comment on reviews. The key is to make a rebuttal empathetic and professional. For example:“We appreciate <name> taking the time to write a review about us. We are sorry that he/she had a negative experience. We have taken steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again and would like to invite <name> back in for a free parking day.” Other sites don’t allow owner responses, so the only action you can take is to get more positive reviews.