How Customer Service Teams Should Respond to Google’s New Changes

AbuseRank. BadRank. Call it what you will but Google is now threatening to add penalties to firms with a poor online reputation. Customer experience and service teams need to consider how this will affect them.

The story has been done to death by the New York Times and the Search Engine Optimisation blogs but I’m going to take a fresh look from a customer service point of view.

What is AbuseRank or BadRank

Each link to your website is a vote for it. The better the website that links to you the more the vote counts for. For years sites have been manipulating this by selling links from their sites to other websites. As revealed by the New York times this algorhythm has been manipulated by websites deliberately providing the worst service conceivable. The service is so bad that people blog or write about it. Each story about their bad service is a link to the website.

The more bad stories, the more links. More links equals a better search engine.

The long and short of it is that Google has been promoting sites which offer a poor experience to the user.

To combat this Google is now going to penalise sites where it detects that people are poor sentiment about your website. This sounds good at first glance but it’s something the service teams need to understand.

How Customer Service Teams Should Respond

Here are my recommendations on what you should be doing:

1. Monitor what is said about your company and reach out to dissatisfied customers to rectify the situation
2. Provide a great service – after all prevention is better than a cure
3. Encourage customers to write good reviews by providing outlets on your website and social media channels
4. Ensure that the process for complaint through your company is straightforward and reconcilatory

It was said that on the internet a customer who has had a bad experience will tell 6,000 people. Typically they’ll tell others out of a sense of frustration. Perhaps even hopelessness. By following the steps above you can not only improve your customer service but also increase your search engine ranking!