How far would you go to fight off negative reviews?
As a business owner, it is not too farfetched to think that a negative review can seem like a personal attack. Think about all the resources you have poured into your business. Not to mention all of the time you have put into it, so when someone writes a few negative words about your business, it is understandable to be upset.
In addition, there are many people who have various perspectives or experiences with a certain business. Everyone has different levels of satisfaction. Some people’s expectations may be unrealistically higher than others. Especially if these people just had a bad day and waiting a little too long for your service just does not cut it for them.
Another perspective is the ones review sites offer the public. If you look at Yelp, some business owners consider them bullies. There is even a movie, which came out this year called ‘Billion Dollar Bully’ that accuses Yelp of mob-like behavior. This is due to the fact that the way the site filters reviews is based on a business paying them or not for their services.
They are not the only review sites considered a bully. So with all these different review sites not helping out, what options do businesses have? How far will they go to get a review taken down? Remember, this is their livelihood we are talking about.
A customer of a doggie daycare actually faces a $1 million dollar lawsuit for writing an honest review about the place. It wasn’t even that cruel of a review. So now the question becomes, how can that daycare sue a customer for their negative online review?
In a nutshell, this is possible due to the gag clause. When a customer purchases a service, within the fine print, companies can add gag clauses to their service agreements. What this means for customers is they will be faced with legal action is they decided to leave a negative review.
But as consumers, not many people actually take the time to read the fine print of all contracts they sign. The case of the doggie daycare customer getting sued is not an isolated incident. If you do some digging, you will find many other customers that have fallen victim of violating the business’ gag clause.
There are some state legislatures that have enforced laws to make these gag clauses not hold in court. When you hear stories of defenceless customers being sued over writing an honest review, how would your perception of the business look in your eyes and the eyes of the public?
Businesses who chose to go down the route of having gag clauses and sticking by them does not send the right message to anyone since they are communicating how unfriendly, dishonest and questionable they are.
