If you have, then you will know it doesn’t feel right. Most small business owners do our best to provide the best service we can to our clients. For so many of us, we take this responsibility seriously and we always try as hard as we can. That we let anyone down feels like a personal failure. But even worse, is that someone suggests to the world that our service was not good enough when it is not true.
Now, Google has a process for getting down reviews that they say fall foul of their user guidelines. One of those is that the reviewer did not have a “genuine user experience.” So, in theory it should be easy to get this sort of thing removed. This is not accurate as it took three forms, many emails and eventually the offending review was removed. But should it be that hard?
I think we all understand that we should not be able to get reviews taken down just because we do not like them. Even more importantly, as consumers we want to know when other customers have genuinely had negative experiences as there are some service providers that we all should steer clear of. So, what’s the balance? Reviewers could be asked to tick an extra box to confirm that they were clients/had used services etc, that might not stop people who were just out there to cause trouble, but it could add an extra layer of deterrent.
Spending the best part of a day to get a fraudulent review taken down was not fair use of a small businesses time. What do you think?
As this could happen to any business owner, we felt it was accurate to have our readers’ comments on it.
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