Business owners know the importance of creating a strong online presence, so these days you would be hard-pressed to find an auto detailing service without a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Trustpilot or a Yelp account. These sites provide everything auto detailing services need to showcase their services to potential customers, including customer reviews. As a potential customer, how much emphasis should you place on these reviews when assessing auto detailing services? Here are a few guidelines.
Pros of reading online reviews
1. Get great insight into potentially the whole business – While the majority of customers don’t bother to write detailed reviews, there are some customers who like to include a lot of details, more so if their experience has been bad. These reviews can include details such as the quality of service, customer care experience, fairness of the cost, etc. These types of reviews are of great help when it comes to evaluating auto detailing services.
2. See customer experience in images and videos – People also like to include images and/or videos to back their reviews up. So if you need more assurance, these can be helpful resources.
3. Get to know how a business treats its customers – When customers post reviews, a business has the ability to respond to these reviews. Especially by keeping an eye on how a business handles negative reviews, you can get an understanding about whether an auto detailing service is truly professional. You would not want to go to a service that does not handle negative criticism well.
Cons of reading online reviews
Reliability of reviews – Both the business and customers could be culprits of misleading potential customers. The internet is not the most reliable place because it can be manipulated easily. An auto detailing service can have false 5 star reviews on its website while a person holding a personal grudge against the business owner could trash the service. Also, an auto detailing service, like any other business, will not profit from negative reviews. So to keep their record clean, they might delete negative reviews. Surveys have showed that not having any negative reviews is not completely good for a service either because it makes a potential customer suspect dishonesty. The bottom-line is, online reviews may not be the best yardstick to measure the quality of a service.
However, there are a few ways to spot fake reviews. When a person reviews businesses on a specific site, for instance Yelp, people can view his/her review history. If that person’s account is full of negative reviews, it can be a troll account. If there is one glowing 5 star review among a group of negative reviews, there is a chance that this review was posted by the business itself.
While at first glance there are more pros than cons, we believe that the con – the issue of reliability – outweighs all the pros. However, despite concerns with reliability, people will continue to use online reviews to assess auto detailing services. Online reviews definitely make your life easier, as you can make a quick decision. But the only reviews that can be trusted are the once you get from people you personally know.
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