Yelp Critique

With the recent fall out at the wedding on December 5, 2012, its been tough recovering due to the Yelp reviews recalling the unfortunate events. Given we’ve lost roughly $20,000 since, it may be tempting to pay a third party company upwards of $10 per positive review on our Yelp page. I advise strongly against this for a few crucial reasons.

The first reason is that encouraging fake reviews is unethical. If the public were to ever hear of it, they would lose trust in Dancing Deer Mountain. Customers want to be able to trust the authenticity of our services, and it makes for bad public relations when things like this occur. An honest, dignified approach to the problem is desirable and I’m sure this is the kind of approach you want to take.

Secondly, there are much better options that can enhance our ratings. The plan is two-fold:

We can respond to critics in a reasonable way.
We can encourage clients to write new reviews from now on.

Yelp has a feature that allows business owners to respond to user reviews. A short and friendly explanation will redeem us from the negative feedback. It will also tell potential customers that we care enough to listen to our customers and strive to be better. A business that listens and interacts with people seems more concerned about the customer experience.

Following that, we need to kindly ask new customers who book our venue to visit our Yelp page. Instead of paying money for fake reviews, we should reach out to our current satisfied customer base and ask them to share their experience. Since we offer an excellent service, the reviews will come. Customers like to help businesses that do their job well.

Given these reasons, I hope that you consider taking the more effective approach to recover. Written responses to reviews and authentic customer feedbacks will produce the same results but they will also be authentic. The last thing we want to do is put the business in a serious predicament due to false reviews....