Here are two very dangerous scenarios:

Your company has poor reviews online. Potential customers are scared away.

Your company has no reviews online. If you receive one poor review, you are toast, because you don’t have good reviews to balance it.

In either case, you have a problem. And both problems have the same solution: Garner positive online reviews as often as possible to give yourself a “cushion” against the occasional negative feedback.

A law that just went into effect this year called the Consumer Review Fairness Act protects customers against being prohibited from writing a negative review. Business who try to write contracts and agreements that prohibit negative reviews will find themselves on the wrong side of this law.

We all know that no business is perfect and not every customer will be 100% satisfied in every transaction. There are also misinformed people who review the incorrect company. I suspect someone who was angry at Insight Cable (not SiteInSight) may have given my company a one-star review at Google, since I have did not recognize and have never done business with the person who left the review, and they only clicked the single star without writing any details about the problem. Still, it affected my overall rating and I can’t make it go away.

The landscape seems unfair to business owners. So what is the solution?

Business owner and managers must be proactive about requesting online reviews, and they must make it simple for their customers to follow through. At SiteInSight we have different tools to choose from, depending on budget and style, to make it easy for you to ask your customers and clients for good reviews.

Our review technology can send only happy customers to the review sites, and redirect negative feedback straight to you. This is a huge advantage, because the unhappy customer can blow off steam and feel heard, you receive valuable information about how you can improve, and the issue can be resolved off-line.

For more information about how to work on your online reputation and build up a positive reputation that can sustain the occasional bruise, check out a video from SiteInSight CEO Alice Foeller.