KLT Authority · Episode 4
How To Get More Reviews For Your Local Business
About this episode
This episode explains why online reviews matter for local businesses, how to ask for them without breaking platform rules, and how to reply to bad ones. Big Shannon and Little Shannon share examples from their own clients and experience. Listeners come away with a clear approach to getting steady positive reviews and handling negative ones calmly.
Show notes
Why reviews matter
- People check Google reviews even after a friend recommends a business, so word of mouth now gets checked online.
- Google looks for consistent, recent reviews; 100 reviews from three years ago do little for search visibility today.
- Google serves the searcher, so it favors businesses whose reviews suggest a good experience.
- Most people look at Google, so it is the review platform to put first, though other platforms are still worth using.
- A rating of 4.8 or 4.9 looks more believable than a perfect five stars.
What not to do
- Offering discounts or money for reviews is against the terms of every major review platform.
- Google can take down the whole Google My Business listing, not just the reviews, which is a serious loss for a business.
- Review gating is also against Google's terms: do not send only happy customers to Google and hide the option from unhappy ones.
- A compliant version asks if the customer would recommend the business; a "no" goes to an internal feedback form, and the customer is still offered the chance to post a review elsewhere afterward.
Using reviews as accountability
- Customers often blame the business name for the actions of front-line staff, as in the countertop story where the owner was invited to see the poor work.
- Repeated complaints, like doctor's office wait times, point to simple fixes such as better communication.
- Feedback helped the hosts find a missed task in their own pipeline.
- One office uses positive reviews to decide staff bonuses.
Replying to reviews
- Reply to good reviews with a simple thank you, since writing a review takes effort, especially for iPhone users who may not be logged into Google.
- Reply to bad reviews too, but do not argue or explain the whole situation online.
- Acknowledge the review, say the feedback is taken seriously, and invite the person to call.
- Think about wording before posting; phrases like "your issue" can come across badly in text.
- Even when the business was at fault, do not over-apologize publicly.
- Fake or unrelated negative reviews happen; ask the person to contact the business, and know that removal requests rarely succeed unless the review breaks Google's rules.
- Reply through the owner's Google My Business account so the response shows as coming from the owner, not a staff member.
- Respond within 24 to 48 hours.
Getting more positive reviews
- Asking in person helps, but many people forget afterward because leaving a review takes several steps.
- A card with a review link helps a little.
- An automated text or email follow-up that makes leaving a review simple works best; the hosts describe their SSP Reviews system.
- Staff enter a name plus a phone number or email, and the customer gets a message asking for stars or a yes/no recommendation.
- Customers get instructions for logging into Google or Facebook to post.
- Roughly seven in ten people may give a star rating, and fewer write full comments.
- Negative feedback often stays in the internal form, giving the business a chance to fix the problem before it goes public.
- The best answer to a bad review is more positive reviews; one low review among many five-star ones pulls the average down far less.
Resources mentioned
- KLT Authority(opens in a new tab)
Mentioned as a place to contact the hosts and book a call about the review system.
Full transcript
KLT Authority Podcast Season 1, Episode 4. Welcome to the KLT Authority Podcast, where we help you grow your business by leveraging the power of the internet and the technology that it offers. Here are your hosts, Big Shannon and Little Shannon. Yeah, that's right. The power couple with the same name. What's going on, everyone? My name's Shannon. And I'm Little Shannon. That's right. Like the lady said, the power couple with the same name. Back again for another episode. Today, we're going to be talking about what did you say and why are reviews important?
So basically what that means is we're going to be talking about reviews, how to get reviews, how to respond to reviews, why reviews are important, and all of that good stuff. Yeah, this is very important to your business. This is your walking billboard, as we call it. It's the easiest way for a person to shout your praises as well as deflate your business at the same time. So we want to talk about ways to get good reviews and what to do with those bad reviews.
Listen, I could lay down a ton of statistics for you that show exactly how important reviews are to your business and how those reviews will impact your business, either negatively or positively, and how they impact the bottom line of your business. But simply put is this, and that is people more and more are looking at reviews at a staggering rate and people are judging businesses more and more based on those online reviews. So what I like to say as a rule of thumb back in the day, you would say, oh, I get all my business word of mouth. And it's great because word of mouth, someone is giving your business praises. So they're saying, hey, go to them. They are good.
And here's what happens nowadays. They say, hey, go to them. They are good. And then the person says, your business on Google, they do a search for your business, and then they look at what everyone else says. They said, hey, my friend thinks you're great. What does everyone else think? And then if everyone else thinks that you're great, they're going to be like, well, did my friend just have an odd great experience? Or is this place actually really good? So it's super important. I could go on and on, and I'm not going to waste a ton of your time trying to convince you that reviews are important. If you do not think reviews are important, go ahead. Stop the podcast.
Go on with your merry self. But realize you will never achieve the type of success that you want to achieve because you are going to miss more and more business, especially as the years tick on. And then you'll be blaming someone else or something else because your online presence is trash. It's garbage, and no one else comes. Right. And even beyond what the consumer is looking to find out by your reviews, this is also going to affect you and how you're ranking on Google. It goes into all these different algorithms on the back end that are required to show that you are a real business, so that consecutive reviews are coming through.
It's not just that you have a good review from two years ago and maybe a handful of them and nothing else. So we provide a way and the knowledge to teach you of how to get those reviews consistently, as well as using the reviews as an accountability system for your staff. Yeah, a lot of times we talk to businesses and they're like, I have 138 reviews, and I got them 15 years ago. Not 15. Man, I'm exaggerating way too hard here. But I got them three years ago, four years ago, when you could literally pay people for reviews and just rack up 150 reviews and Google will do nothing about it. However, what they do is they look at consistency. So they want to see a consistent amount of reviews.
If you have 100 reviews from three years ago, it does you no good today in terms of the search engine size because you've had nothing for three years. So they say, well, I mean, they were great then, but did they go out of business? Are they still in business? No one's talking about them. No one's reviewing them. So we're probably not going to show them because we want to make sure our end user, the searcher, has a great experience on our search engine. So that's what we have to keep in mind is Google's customer. Google wants to please the end searcher. They do not want to please us, even though we generally, in terms of advertising, are the ones that pay the bills.
The person that keeps them in business is the end searcher. So they need to make sure that they have a good experience. So they want to show businesses that have good reviews because if other people say that they have good experiences there, they can confidently say, okay, you'll probably have a good experience there too. So it makes it easier for them to recommend you. So it's important. And I know we reference Google a lot. And the reason being is when you go to look for a business or a service, you go to Google just like your consumer is. No, no, no. My customer doesn't use Google. Yeah, we do hear that too. But believe me, anybody that has a phone in their hand is using Google.
You know, there's other things out there, of course, that you can get reviews on and not that they're, you know, not important. If you're utilizing them, then absolutely utilize them. But your number one review is going to come with Google. That's where it's very important. But also to understand, you know, like you just said a little bit ago, back when Google first started, you could pay for reviews. You could do all these things. And this is why it's important to listen to these podcasts with us or to even use our services is because we have a lot of knowledge on the back end that there's a lot of things that you can do wrong with requesting reviews and you could get yourself in trouble.
Yeah, exactly. Like a lot of people say, well, I'm just going to run a contest. And if you leave a review, you get a 10% discount or $10 off or $15 off. That is against the terms and conditions of every single major review platform. And here's the crazy thing. If Google finds out about it and believe me, people love to snitch, guess what? They're going to shut down your listing. At the end, like not just your review, like they will shut down your Google, my business listing, which is your number one asset we've covered. Exactly. The best case scenario is that they, they take down your reviews. However, the usually what happens is just what she said. They take your listing down.
That is horrible for your business. Unless you've been in the town for 45 years, everyone knows who you are and everyone goes in there. You need a Google, my business listing to help get new customers, especially if you're less than five years old. And in case you don't know what we're talking about, you need to go back to our previous. We've already covered that. And if you truly don't know what your Google, my business listing is your number one asset, you need to contact us. Right. So let's, let's first talk a little bit about the reviews, what we're looking to get in the reviews, the type of things we want people to say about us.
We'll talk a little bit about negative reviews, what to do about that. And then we'll talk about how to get those reviews and the best way to get those reviews. Awesome. So obviously some of the things you're looking for in a great review, like we mentioned, is that that person is your talking billboard and it's free. Why not utilize that on Google? You know, you want to definitely have that person shouting your praises from the rooftop, whether you have someone coming into a storefront, you know, people look at, is your office clean? Is, you know, is it a big cluttered mess? Are there boxes everywhere? Is the staff friendly? Did they greet me when they came in?
When I came in the door, was I ignored? You know, things like that. Did the person, like I said, look up when they were on the phone to tell me they would be with me in just a moment or, you know, again, being ignored. Right. And one of the things about it is what would you rather hear? Or let's take it this way. You can say how great you are till you're blue in the face, but no one cares. However, they will care if someone else says that you are good. So like she said, clean office, friendly staff, you show up on time. Service-based businesses is what we mostly work with. You show up on time. You are able to get the job done quickly. You do the job correctly.
You care about your customers, all of those things. So I never tell anyone, coach them. I always say when you're talking to someone, ask them for a review and give honest feedback. But what you should be doing is making sure people know that you have given great service. So what I'm talking to customers, I say, hey, how did you think we did? And I'll get their feedback. Oh, you did great. Yeah, you know, we got it done on time. Oh, yeah, you got it done on time. We did the job that you said we were or that we said we were going to do. Oh, yeah, you did the job that you said you were going to do. All of that good stuff. Oh, man, that would be great. Can you leave a review for me?
So you want those types of things in there. Now, here's the thing. You cannot please everyone. And it doesn't matter how good you are. Someone is going to get because in a lot of businesses, you're not the front person on the line. They don't even know. Your name might be on the business sign, but that consumer hasn't personally met you. If I go to a restaurant and I have bad service, am I just saying, oh, I met John Smith, the owner of the Italian restaurant I went to, and he cooked my food wrong. He gave me bad service from the time I walked in the door. He did this, he did that. No, I'm talking about your staff. I'm saying the person didn't greet me when I came in.
The food was cooked horribly. John Smith probably isn't even in the restaurant because he's the business owner. So what's bad about that is you started this business from the ground up. You've put in the hard work and the people that you're hiring to fill that job spot and fulfill the job are now disappointing your business name. So you want to make sure that your staff understands these reviews and how this all works.
Yeah, and a great example would be we were getting our kitchen redone and we went with Corian Countertops and Corian Countertops can be sanded and things like that, but when they brought our countertops in, they looked like absolute garbage and were like, this is not right, we're not accepting this, like you gotta fix this. The employees came in with a sander, sanded the countertops down in our house with no shop vac or nothing attached to it to catch the dust, completely destroyed our house. The cabinets still look like garbage and the guy's like, are you happy now? And we're like, no, this looks like garbage.
And he's like, oh, well just give it six months, as it gets dirty, you won't even be able to notice it. Right, and well, and as business owners, we took a different approach to that. I'm not going, a lot of people don't have a business owner mindset, but in situations I look at it as I would want someone to talk to me directly as the business owner if something was happening with my business. So I'm not gonna stand in my house and argue with the employee that's been hired to do the job that obviously doesn't care because his name isn't on the truck out front. His name isn't the one that's gonna get the bad review. The name on the truck is what's gonna get the bad review.
So we personally invited the business owner to come in to see what kind of work his name was representing. And he was appalled. I mean, he was embarrassed. Like this isn't the quality of work that we do, this and that. However, this is who you've hired in your business that's on the front line. I have personally met you when you came out to give me an estimate, but you weren't here as a business owner to do the work yourself. So the people that you're hiring to fulfill the job, they need to be doing the job. Obviously it's always our number one intention when we hire someone is they should be doing the job just as I would and care just as much as I would.
In the real world, that doesn't always happen. A lot of people go to work for a paycheck or they truly think they're doing the best job out there. However, it's still not their name on the end project. So with that being said, it is very important to use your reviews as an accountability tool. So it's just another plus to that so you actually have documentation of something. Now, again, we went back to, you can't please everybody. There's gonna be people out there that just wanna gripe. They just wanna complain. They just want to, they're just miserable. That's just how it goes.
When you have those people, obviously you're gonna know that from the type of person that your staff is, that your staff represents. If they get good reviews all the time and then this one comes through and you can talk to this person on the phone and you can kind of see from there like, okay, we'll take care of it and you can handle it from there. We'll talk about how to reply to those reviews in a minute. But just making sure that you use your reviews as an accountability tool as well so that you avoid those issues in the future because you don't want the same review over and over again. We see that with a lot of doctors that we work with.
Oh, I waited 45 minutes in the lobby and nobody told me that the doctor was running behind. That's a simple fix of communication. Right, and that's a great thing about reviews is it highlights the things that need worked on inside of your business. Listen, we're not perfect. There's issues that arise in our business where we actually just, one of our longest standing clients, we dropped the ball on a project that we were supposed to do for them. It was a simple fix, something that had a deadline and we're like, oh yeah, we'll do it, but we'll do it next week. It did not get put into the pipeline properly and then the owner calls and they're like, what's going on?
And we're like, holy cow, we totally dropped the ball on that. However, it was a learning experience because guess what? The task was not put into the pipeline properly, therefore it was not handled and therefore we had a customer that was angry. Luckily, that review didn't go online and it wasn't a bad review, but it was feedback and there's a lot of times, we have one business and they're like, I don't want reviews, why would I ask someone to leave a review? What if they leave a negative review? What if they say something bad about me?
I'm like, they are and that's a good thing because it allows you to learn, it allows you to teach and then we have businesses where they get the bad reviews and they do zero about them. They don't learn from their mistakes. So it's one of those things where this is good for you either which way and on top of that, when people are looking at reviews, they don't expect five stars. They expect 4.8, 4.9 and the reason being is when you have five stars, it looks fishy. They're like, oh, no one's ever complained ever? Yeah, right. Right and again with the accountability tool, it doesn't always have to be about the negative reviews for accountability.
We have an office that uses it to give bonuses to their staff because they know based off the reviews that this person has just gotten positive reviews, positive reviews, whether it was the smiling face or they helped me, they went above and beyond, things like that. So it's also a way in that accountability tool to highlight the people that are doing their job and those could be the future. Those people could be the future of your business. So it's always good to keep track of those as well. Yeah, because at the end of the day, it's all about being better and learning from our mistakes and using them as stepping stones. Man, cannot talk.
But let's get a little bit into how to reply to reviews and should you reply to reviews? Right, so people ask that all the time and even the good ones, yes, you should, especially the bad ones, yes, you should. Most of the time, those good reviews could be as simple as just a simple thank you. Right, it's one of those things you just wanna say, hey, thanks for the review, we really appreciate it, acknowledge the person because they took, at the end of the day, they took time out of their day to write that review and sometimes, as you know, writing a review isn't that easy, especially on Google if you're an iPhone user.
It's a lot easier for Android users, but if you're an iPhone user, generally speaking, that person is not logged into Google, so they have to go to Google, they have to log into Google, they have to write the review, they have to submit it and it's multiple steps, so they took time out of their day, so you wanna at least acknowledge them and say, hey, thank you, we really appreciate it. Now, on the bad ones, should you reply to those?
Yes, absolutely, and you have to be careful with this, though, too, I mean, and you can reply to them directly through your Google account, by the way, when you log into your Google My Business, however, addressing the entire situation online is never the solution. Right, you don't want to challenge the reviewer online, even if they go on and they're like, this place is garbage, the most incompetent people I've ever seen in my life, it is stupid, don't ever go there, it's a waste of money.
When you read that, I know, your head gets red, your blood starts to boil, you wanna jump through the computer screen and drop kick them because it's not the truth, however, you can't do that, what you want to do is simply acknowledge their review and then invite them to talk further about it, and it can be as simple as this, hey, John, reviewer, thank you so much for your review, we take all of our feedback very seriously and we wanna be the best we possibly can be, so I'd love to sit down and talk to you more about your issue and how we can best resolve that for you, please give us a call.
Right, and I'm gonna just back up a little bit because words and how they're interpreted through a text, we all know, can be misinterpreted, so even saying with your issue might push them, like, I don't have an issue, you have an issue, to discuss the circumstances or whatever, but you just think about it before you just start typing, I mean, that's true in all of life, don't just react to something, you need to properly respond, and remember that your business is the name at hand, so you wanna make sure you're answering in a respectful way, but again, this is gonna be seen from other people to say, oh, okay, they had a the time as a business to then look and say, okay, what can we do to make this feedback positive instead of negative?
So your future clients are gonna see that as well. Right, and generally what I tell people is, listen, even if you know you were wrong, don't go in there and be like, listen, we totally screwed up, so sorry that we messed up so bad, like we screwed the pooch on this one, like oh my goodness, it was horrible. Like don't go on and do that. You simply wanna acknowledge it and invite them to talk further about it. That's the best way to do it because here's the problem.
If you go on to the review and be like, listen, Joe Blow, you're full of crap, you're a type of person that can never be pleased, we bent over backwards for you, did everything above and beyond and you're still not happy, go fly a kite, guess what's gonna happen? They're gonna go enlist their friends. They're gonna be like, hey, you heard about Joe, the business owner over there, he's disrespectful for me, go leave a review. And unfortunately, there's shady people out there that are like, all right, yeah, let's do it. And then they'll get with their other friends and say, hey, this place is horrible, can you leave a review for me?
And then it goes on and on, especially if you are like a nonprofit and someone doesn't agree with your nonprofit, there's entire like groups of people that just get their satisfaction in life by going on and giving you negative reviews without even doing business with you. Well, and that's another good point is that we get a lot of calls from our clients that will say like, I looked this person up in our system and they're not even our customer. We never, our patient, like we've never seen them before. We didn't do a service for them and they just left us a one-star review.
Most of the time, that's how it is and they don't leave a comment or they've left a whole comment based on, like you just said, they've gone to your website and said like, well, no, I don't like that. Or you came out for an estimate and they didn't like what you gave them. So then it was something else that you didn't do for them. There's ways to respond to that as well. But again, just not fully online asking, letting them know, like we apologize, we're not finding you in our database, please contact us to discuss this further, things like that. And sometimes it'll pop up where the person that gave you the review is Joe's grandma.
Well, you didn't know that Joe wasn't giving you the review, his grandma that lives upstairs did. Like it's just, you don't know where that review's coming from, but you always wanna respond, that's the whole point. Just be careful in how you're doing so. Yeah, and we actually, to be honest with you, we have a review on our Google My Business of someone that we've never actually done business before, have no clue who it is, and it's gonna happen. And unfortunately, part of that is people are shady, they'll hire some shady people sometimes, and people know that negative reviews influence Google rankings and things like that.
So agencies, unfortunately, will buy Google reviews that are negative. And unfortunately, there's not much you can do about it if the review does not break Google's terms of service. And you can request for it to be removed, saying, hey, we've never done business with this person. However, 99.9% of the time, it's gonna stay, it's not going to go away. But what's the best solution for negative reviews? It's positive reviews. So we need to get more and more positive reviews to combat those negative, those few negative reviews. So if you have a good review, a one-star review, and a, I mean, a five-star review and a one-star review, what's the average of between one and five?
It turns out to be what, a 2.5, right? Right. So if you want your review rating to be a 4.8, you need to get 10 more five-star reviews to combat that one review. So you need to constantly be asking for those possible or those positive reviews. So what's the best way to get more positive reviews? One of the best ways is to simply ask for them. And the problem, though, is when you ask for them, people have the best intentions to give you a review. You say, hey, listen, you just told me you had a great experience, you loved Julie and our staff, and it would really help us out if you could leave the review. And the person wants to help you out, so they want to leave the review.
However, unfortunately, it's a hassle to leave a review. It's not super simple to leave a review. So they have the best intentions to do it. They go down the road, they forget about it, and they never leave the review. So you don't get it. Then you have ways you can actually print out a business card with a link, give it to them, say, hey, listen, go to this link and click on it. It'll take you right to Google to leave us a review. That helps. However, the absolute best way is to use a system that automatically follows up with them and makes it super simple, as simple as possible, for them to leave a review.
And we have one of those systems actually available for you, SSP Reviews, which makes it super simple to leave that review. Can you explain a little bit how that works and the process of what happens when we ask someone for a review? So it's super simple for your customer, patient, client, however you're working with them. And we work with all different types of businesses. So we've worked with realtors to doctors to pest control, you know, all over the board. So different types of services that are being offered.
And all you would have to do is enter their basic information, which would be their name, phone number, if they were gonna be receiving it by text or email or both, and then it comes right to their phone in a text. And I'm sure you've been at a place like that. A lot of places are actually utilizing the system now, and it makes it easy. They still have to go in, actually hit, you know, click their text. It takes them to the review platform for them to then, you know, rave about their service. As simple as clicking how many stars, you know, you are, whatever, you know, if they wanna leave a comment in that moment.
Yeah, and one thing I wanna talk about before we actually get into the nitty gritty of exactly how it works is one caveat here is review gating is against the terms and service of Google. What does review gating mean? So Google doesn't want you to ask for a review online and then not allow them to leave that review on Google. So an example of review gating would be that you would say, hey, I'm gonna send you a text that's gonna ask you for a review. And they click on the link and the webpage says, hey, would you recommend us? Yes or no? If they click yes, it takes them to Google to leave a review.
If they click no, it takes them to an internal form to leave feedback and then does not give them the option to leave that feedback. So that's called review gating and it's actually against the terms of service. So you don't wanna do that. However, there's still no issue in asking them how you did. So for example, you take them to a website that says, would you review us? Or would you recommend us? Yes or no? If they click yes, takes them to Google to leave the review. If they say no, takes them to an internal feedback form that allows them that you say, hey, listen, we really wanna make sure that we give the best service possible. What happened? Can you please explain it to us?
And they fill out the form, they submit the form and then it says, hey, would you like to leave that review anywhere else? And you still give them the option. So you can still get that feedback. However, you are not gating them. You're not giving them the option to leave their review if it's not negative. So you don't wanna do that. That's one of the big caveats. So the way our system works is we will, you put them into the system. And if you're, let's say pest control, you can actually put a link right onto your phone, on your home screen, you click it, it pops up the input form, you put in their name, their phone number, their email address, and then it sends them a text or an email.
If you don't have an email, you don't have to put it in the email. If you don't have a phone number, you don't have to put it in the phone number, one or the other, but you need one or the other. It's then gonna send them an email or text or both. And it's gonna say, hey, depending on how you set it up, either how many stars would you give us or would you recommend us yes or no? And then it's going to allow them to easily leave that review online. And we give them instructions. If they're gonna leave it on Google, if they say, yeah, I'd love to leave a review for you, it's going to take them to instructions that say, hey, listen, this is what's gonna happen.
You're gonna click this link, it's gonna open up an app, it's probably gonna ask you to log in, you're gonna need to log in with your Gmail account, and then you can leave the review. If you're going to Facebook, most of the time it's pretty simple because most people have Facebook, it opens up their app and they can leave the review. So that's kind of And you know the it's available right in their hand, in their phone to take them to do this review. And again, some people aren't going to do it. They're like, yeah, I'll leave your review, send me the text. They're not going to do it.
And that's okay because if you're sending it out to every single person that you have provided a service to nine, I would say probably seven out of 10 of them are at least going to give you the star ratings. Not everybody is going to leave you a full comment because again, it takes time. Oh, I'll just leave them the stars, click through. Okay, I'm good. But again, those people that are over the top about something that you did, they're going to be the ones that leave the full paragraph on Google, which is fine. So again, statistically, some people aren't going to open it. Some people are going to open it, just give you the stars and some people are going to give you complete feedback.
So you can't expect every single person to leave you that big long book on Google. Right. And sometimes we get a customer like, I got a one star review. Your system stinks. Actually, it doesn't because that one star review probably just helped you. Right. And it's one of those things too where I'm like, hey, listen, I didn't say I was going to prevent one star reviews or negative reviews. I said, we're going to help you get as many five star reviews as we possibly can. And guess what? Those one star reviews, those two star, three star reviews, they're going to come through, but it's okay. Right. And that's the great thing about our system is a lot of people, they just want to complain.
So they will go and utilize the platform, complain, you get the feedback and they don't leave it on Google. They don't press the option after they've complained to you on the forum to go further onto Google to re-complain. That form is coming to you inside internally to evaluate the circumstances to improve from there and make the circumstance right. So you actually, by utilizing our system, it's helping you because it's giving them the platform to complain and keeping them from going directly to Google because once they do that, we can't help you with that. Right, exactly. And like she said, most people that leave one star reviews are not vindictive, mean people.
I mean, there are some that are. It's crazy. Well, and reality is, is we're asking them. We're asking them for their feedback. So their feedback could be, I've seen it again, different businesses, different people, but it could be, oh, the staff was great. However, the doctor didn't listen to my concerns or vice versa. The staff was horrible. They didn't even look at me. I didn't get a smile, but the doctor was amazing. So there's different avenues of this. But reality is, is you're asking them for their feedback. You want to know, that's the whole point of this. You want to know how to make your business better. So you avoid all of this in the future.
Right, and when you ask, like I was saying, people aren't vindictive. They're not mean people by nature most of the time. Once they give you the feedback, they don't feel the need to go any further to put it on Google, on Facebook, and everywhere that they can actually see because they're so mad at you. They're saying, okay, let's see if they make this right. So you're given an option to correct the situation or diffuse the situation would probably be a better way to put it before it gets out there and tarnishes your reputation online, which is always a good thing.
And the good thing about our platform as well is we have it set up not only with just weekly reporting, but we say you should always respond to those reviews within 24 to 48 hours. So if that negative review comes through, it alerts you through your email to say, hey, you need to take a look at this so you or your supervisor or someone can address it before it goes on too long because people that don't monitor their reviews, they'll go a month in and they're like, oh, we didn't even know that this person had a problem. Well, that is a problem because you didn't care.
And our platform allows you to respond to the customer, give them a positive feedback to the circumstance and correct the situation to maybe prevent that in the future. But like I said, it's not something that just gets missed or push on the road because then you're really going to make them mad. Yeah. And at the end of the day, you need to make sure that you're responding through your Google My Business account, and that will say that the response came from the owner. So if you have, let's say, Sally on your staff, be like, hey, listen, this is what I want to say. Reply to this for me. Or you send it to us and you want us to reply for you.
We don't want your staff member to log into their Google My Business account and then reply. And it says this reply is from Sally. We want to say this reply is from the owner. And if you go through your Google My Business account and reply through there, it will show that it's actually coming from the owner of the business. So that's actually important as well. I don't know. Is there anything else we want to really talk about? No, not for the review system. I think we've covered everything there. Like I said, when we first opened, this is very important. This is your walking billboard. This is the front line for you.
So it's definitely something that you want to be tracking and on top of so you're getting those positive consecutive reviews. Exactly. Now, if you want us to help you, you can go to sspreviews.com or kltauthority.com, and that will get you in touch with us, and we can talk to you more about our review system and how it works and how it will help you and your business actually be set up with a call with one of our people to walk you through the system and all that good stuff. So kltauthority.com or sspreviews.com, either one of those places will allow you to get in contact with us. Also, what we want to do is make sure that you go and like our podcast, leave a review for our podcast.
That would really help us. Back to reviews. Review really helps the podcast. So we're trying to help as many local businesses as we actually can. There's so many podcasts about internet business. However, most of the podcasts are about information products. They're about e-commerce stores, Etsy, Shopify, all of these things. However, we know as local businesses, we need to leverage the internet, but how do we leverage the internet? What do we do? How do we do it? What technology is available to us? What should we be doing with social media? All of those questions need to be answered for local businesses. However, there's just not anyone out there doing it.
And the reason being is local business right now for people just isn't super profitable. So everyone is not catering to them. They're just ignoring them. However, I know from experience and with the business that we do is leveraging the internet and the technology that the internet provides will change your business if you do what we say and how we do it. So make sure you rate and review this podcast so more local businesses can see it. If you go to like the Chamber of Commerce or you go to any networking meetings, mention us. Say, hey, listen, you really need to listen to the KLT Authority podcast. That would really help us out. So if you could do that, that'd be great. Yeah.
Thank you for joining us today. And hopefully you guys have a wonderful day and we will talk to you again soon. Yep. Thanks. Have a fantastic day. And as always, hopefully we'll see you on the beaches of the world. That's right.
More from KLT Authority
The Biggest Mistake Entrepreneurs Make While Building Their Authority
Shannon outlines the podcast's new focus on building a sticker business in public and names caring what others think as the biggest mistake.
Don't be consistently inconsistent
Big and Little Shannon discuss why inconsistency stalls business growth and share habits for staying consistent in marketing, time and staff accountability.
Episode 9
What is KLT Authority - KLTA S1E9
Shannon explains KLT Authority (know, like and trust) and the practical steps local businesses can take to build it online.
Episode 8
Video Marketing - What Equipment Do I Need
Shannon lists the video gear a small business needs: a phone camera, a good microphone, a tripod and an editing app, with prices.
