Ripoff Report bogging your business down?
Whether you are a business owner that has a website or not, it is still possible that you may have a Ripoff Report out there.
What is a Ripoff Report? First of all, Ripoff Reports are filed on the Ripoff Report website from consumers that want to voice their concerns and/or overall bad experience with the services or products they received from a company via the Internet or in the store.
While the Ripoff Report website wants these reports to be honest (and most of the time they are) there are still those that fabricate their experiences just to make another company look bad. Now, why would people spend their time doing this? Well, humans have been bad-mouthing one another since the beginning of time. Remember those instances in elementary or high school where you either heard or spread lies about someone you didn’t like that were untrue?
Well, you can do the same thing on the Ripoff Report website!
Having a Ripoff Report out there about your business is stressful, and whether the claim is true or not, one thing you should not do is get overheated and start pointing fingers. After all, you will probably not be able to have it removed.
So, what is the next best thing you can do? Well, the website gives the chance for business owners to file a Rebuttal, aka respond to the claim. When it comes to reputation management in general, one of the things you should be doing is responding to the negative criticism your company is getting. Doing this also means that you actually care enough to correct the problem.
For example, I, Lance Bachmann and my company 1SEO.com, can be found on the Ripoff Report website. Believe me, I am not happy about this, but what I did is respond to the review. I apologized (in the nicest way possible) even though that review looked “fake,” gave them my direct office number and told them I would give them a refund. Unfortunately, the person never responded to me, but the important thing is that I tried to correct the problem they had with me and 1SEO.com.
When it comes to Ripoff Reports, they do have the potential to ruin a business, but if a representative of the company handles the claim in a positive way, it won’t have that much of a detrimental impact. Even though it is essentially a place where people to complain, it is also a place where business owners can find out where they can improve themselves so that another Ripoff Report is NOT filed about that same problem.
