Use spa reviews to improve your business
July 7th, 2009 • Posted by Spa Kat • Permalink
To shrink away from a bad review is like looking at the glass half empty. Sure it stings a bit, but it is an opportunity to improve your business and fix problems before they spiral out of control.
If a spa customer is willing to take the time to review your spa, it is likely they have a strong feeling about the service and treatments they received. Understanding what your customers think is an invaluable tool that can be used to improve your spa and its business practices.
Your goal is to make each spa experience better and that is what reviews can do for your business. They keep you aware of customer needs and allow for gradual improvements over time.
How to Use your customer reviews:
- Develop a process to funnel customer feedback so that it can be looked at through a structured lens and then addressed immediately.
- Use the spa’s positive reviews to promote the spa and identify specific treatments that receive consistently positive feedback. Make sure your spa promotions lead with your spa customers' favorite products and services.
- Use negative reviews to solve problems and let your spa customers know that your goal is to resolve issues and make their spa experience better.
- All reviews that center on customer service, good or bad, should be discussed with the front desk and other key service personnel. It is important to resolve customer service issues and also let your employees know when they are doing a great job.
Use spa reviews to improve your spa’s product and service offerings. Customers writing reviews about your spa are giving you their personal view and you can learn a lot from seeing things from their perspective.
Spaboom has made it easy for our customers to start using online reviews. For more about reviews, read this.
Look for consistent patterns in customer feedback–they will give you powerful information you can use to improve and strengthen your spa business.
• Trackback • Posted in General, Spa Business Management
Why does the Joy of Spa have reviews? Why is having reviews so necessary? There are people online who are just living on their computers giving out reviews because their ego is huge — it satisfies their need for attention. The system is seriously flawed. A day spa opened up in our town and immediately got glowing reviews from someone 500 miles away that has posted over 2000 reviews and I think that person had a business posting glowing reviews for payment. This day spa was so bad — owner yelled at employees and clients during services, had laser services with 16 year-old technicians who only read the book — ended up burning people… this place finally went under two weeks ago. Thank goodness. If you read all their reviews the first ones were stellar and then they got clobbered by really, really mad customers. Either way, the "fake" reviews lured these people in. I think the whole review thing is a bit flawed. I think feedback is good, but there are too many problems with sites that are eager to have people post… I think your new "Joy of Spa" should cater to the businesses that are paying for it and take out the reviews… there aren't any bad ones anyway and then people don't trust the good ones… see? Just my 2 cents. (So glad that weird spa went out of business though! Gee.)
Janet has some good points about potential flaws in the review system, but there are many legitimate reviews out there that are begging to be read by spa owners/managers to help imporve their business or to give kudos where deserved.
I'm the National Spa Examiner at Examiner.com and recently published an article about how to write effective spa reviews. You can read it here:
How to write an effective spa review
I've also written many ( legitimate
) spa reviews for Everythingspa's Blog. I think this is an example of how the system can work properly.
Michele McIntyre
CNYSPAGIRL
On our website we have a link for clients to take a short survey and give us feedback. this has showed to be somewhat helpful. 99% of the time it is our clients who give us feedback. It has really helped us become a better business. Some of the suggestions are small but important, some comments are harsh but necessary, some just help boost are egos. But most of our improvements have come directly from our clients telling us. We have those loyal ones who want around for a long time and have no problem telling us the truth.
As far outside sites….You never know if where these are coming from. We once had a negative review about a service we have never ever offered! It was pretty cruel. Unfortunately we had no way to respond and the site refused to remove it. Our staff and our many of loyal clients(after a short write up in our newsletter) actually bombarded the site with positive reviews.
Actual word of mouth is always better. If online reviews can help supplement your site. Great! But we have definitely gotten 1000X more business from just a few of our clients who love us and love to tell everyone about us. That is why we spend so much time focusing our clients, their needs, and their wants and take online comments with a grain of salt.