Discover the power of authentic customer reviews in today’s digital marketplace. Debbie Hussey, Manager at Northlake Auto Recyclers, emphasizes the impact of genuine feedback versus purchased reviews in the recycled auto parts industry. Learn why honesty, quality, and genuine care build trust, creating businesses worthy of real praise.
Nowadays, people are on the internet more and more. Searching for food recipes, clothes, cars, and auto parts. The internet is a way of life now.
How many times have you been searching for something and either asked friends or family for a word-of-mouth referral? We all have, we want to make sure the person or place that we go to is reputable and reliable. Will they take care of an issue if it arises?
So, let’s relate to the recycled auto parts business. We all try (at least I hope you do) to do the best that we can when it comes to selling parts to customers. We make sure to get all the correct information, year, make, model and VIN number, along with some other questions that will guide us to the correct part for that customer. Once we make the sale, our job is still not over. Did you ask the customer at the counter if they would be kind enough to leave your company and/or employee a review, whether on Google or your website? Ask for real feedback, good, bad or ugly. How was the service and the condition of the part? Most of all, how was that customer treated when they were in your store? Was your salesperson professional and polite? Did he take care of the customer quickly and thank them for their business?
If you did everything you should have done, then getting a review from the customer is a no-brainer. They will tell their friends and family about the great experience they had buying parts from your company. They will leave a real and legitimate review that you can be proud of.
But what happens when you drop the ball with the service and the quality of the part, and your salesman has a bad day and takes it out on the customer with a short temper? While we try not to do this with customers, sometimes it happens. The part may be defective, and you don’t have a replacement. This, at times, does not sit well with that customer, maybe they are having a bad day now and want to vent their frustrations. They may do this with a Google review (feedback) on your company.
Make sure you answer all reviews without bias. Read the review, and if bad, take a couple of hours or a day to calm down from the comments and then write a response to the review. Explain your side and/or apologize for the issue and ask if they would give you a chance to make the next interaction better.
The internet is the new word of mouth. The power of the reviews is amazing. They reach so many people and help establish your business good or bad.
I made mention of getting real and legitimate reviews. I’m sure no matter what the business is, there are people who will have family, friends, or employees leave fake reviews.
These people get some type of compensation for writing a review on the business. Whether it is paying a person to leave a review or giving them a free part, this is not a legit review and is only being done to improve the star rating score of the business. If you are not proud and confident in yourself as an owner, your employees or your business, you should rethink what you’re doing. You should be proud of the business you run and take pleasure and pride when you do get a real customer review and not one that you paid for. These reviews are misleading to the new prospective customers who want to find a good business to buy from.
What happens when that customer deals with you and has a bad experience, he will just think all the reviews you have received to be false and that type of negativity spreads faster than a good experience. Just think about if you were researching a business to deal with and found out all the reviews you read were paid for and fake. Fake or paid-for reviews are easy to spot. You will get one or two bad reviews, then all of a sudden, within days, multiple great reviews come flooding in with people’s names of how good they treated the customer. And these reviews come from somebody that has left only this one review in their lifetime. So easy to spot.
Nothing beats hard work, honesty, quality parts and a nice kind attitude. Treat people like you would like to be treated, and those reviews will come to you. Do this, and you can be saving your money instead of buying reviews.
