When Yelp doesn’t Help!

Nowadays with the incremental use of Social Media and Business Reviews websites, a consistent part of customers are relying on the online reviews before buying a service. One example of this platform is called Yelp and sometimes doesn’t … help :-) Why? I am going to explain it in this post.

I would like to say first, that on the overall, I like this platform. I use myself to search for restaurants in Dublin, so I know what I can expect from the service and food. Of course I do not rely totally on what their customers wrote, but for sure if I see bunch of bad reviews I won’t go there. I think it is normal. On the other hand, being a business owner myself I feel sometimes frustrated when our happy customers review my job with 5 stars and then their reviews go into the “Not Currently Recommended“. Why?

In their dedicated Customer Support Page, it is written that “the review may have been posted by a less established user, or it may seem like an unhelpful rant or rave“, not to mention that “Some of these reviews are fakes” and “many are real reviews from real customers who we just don’t know much about and therefore can’t recommend“.
The last sentence gives me quite bad feelings. Is that mean that if they don’t know a user they cannot publish their reviews?

Working as Carpet Cleaner in Dublin our customers are not all confident with the use of Yelp platform. Most of them don’t know it. It is fair that a business owner shouldn’t influence in any way a customer review; on the other side, if a customer doesn’t know what the heck is Yelp how would it be possible for them to post a review? Another thing to consider is that not all the customers are writers and also they cannot write a poem as feedback. We clean their carpet, they are happy, no funny surprise. That’s it. Because this is the job.
If you are eating at a restaurant you can write if the dish was good or what kind of food you got. If you pay for a Carpet Cleaning job, what you get is somebody who cleans your carpet. What do a customer have to write more about? If they are happy with the service we provides, they should be visible in bold characters and not under “Not Currently Recommended” like the following ones.

An example is our customer Keri who wrotes:

“Great job! The couch looks as good as new. He got the red wine stain out with the whole job done in less than half an hour. Couldn’t be happier  Would highly recommend to anyone looking to get red wine or stains out of their carpets or couches”.

Then it is the time for Paula, who left a review time ago:

Brendan from chem2clean cleaned our carpets today,we ve rented out our house and was in some state.Cant believe how good the carpets cleaned up,highly recommend this company,thanks brendan. paula shankill

I may agree that they could have written more about the service received by our business, but also a customer cannot be forced to write a longer review neither to tell them what to write to see the review recommended. So this is not helpful to businesses who cannot get longer or probably more detailed reviews.

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