Renegade Conservatory Guy

I am delighted to have been accepted as a guest blogger on the RCG site and this is my first post.

Matthew has asked me not to post articles like ‘The importance of buying DIY conservatories from ConservatoryLand’, so I think I’ll steer clear of that sort of thing with a view to not getting kicked off the site

Anyway, being in the retail sector, my first post is about the ever growing pressure on retail companies to meet increasing consumer demands and the potential consequences if they fail to do so.

As we all know, consumers are encouraged to accept nothing less than perfection these days, by the media and in particular, consumer advice programs on TV.

As we also know, achieving perfection every time, first time, and for every customer is not possible for any company, in any industry, we’re all human and we all make mistakes.

The task is made harder still by extremely low sales prices which are driven down by competition and companies still have to find the resources to provide quality products and service levels as near to perfect as they can, or face the consequences.

Ten years ago, the consequences for a retail company failing to completely satisfy a customer was limited to a possible bad debt and missing out on valuable recommendations from that customer’s family, friends and colleagues.

Today, it is a completely different story and there is a brand new threat out there. This threat takes the form of consumer review websites.

More and more consumers are now turning to the internet to find suppliers and increasingly, checking out suppliers on these review sites before contacting them with their enquiry.

Putting it simply, if a consumer checks out your reviews on these sites and you have 8 or 9 poor reviews out of 10 for example, you’re not even going to get their enquiry, and as this becomes common place, the consequences could be potentially devastating for a company.

Currently, companies don’t even have the option to publically respond to their reviews on these sites, which in my personal opinion is grossly unfair.

Fair or unfair, these sites look here to stay and we cannot afford to ignore them, so how should we deal with this?

Well, I can only come up with two solutions at present. The first solution is to be perfect 100% of the time, not very likely. So the only other solution and one that I practice myself is to encourage your satisfied customers to leave you positive reviews on these sites.

If out of 10 customers, you have 9 satisfied ones and 1 dissatisfied one, you are likely to get 1 review out of the 10 customers if left to their own devices, and that review will be the negative one. Unlike dissatisfied customers, satisfied customers will not go out of their way to leave you a positive review of their experience on the internet, unless asked to do so.