Quote:
Originally Posted by Iowanian
I try to take a grain a of salt and look for a common theme, compliment or problem in reviews. Everyone knows there are morons in the world who will think shit is great and great is shit.
My personal opinion and that as a business owner is that it's perfectly fine for people to comment about your business honestly. I've gotten quite a bit of work BECAUSE people have posted about my work or product online or in topic specific forums.
The biggest thing I see is that there should be a space for the business to respond on the major sites. If someone buries you, you should have a space to contradict or explain the problem. Sometimes the best solutions is to ignore it and just work hard to get enough positive clients to drown out the hater.
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The biggest issue i find when dealing with this is that for every 100 customers you do well with, the 1 customer who had the bad experience has the loudest voice.
We had a dickbag customer that we installed a front suspension on his car for, as well as paint and body. It was a $30K job and the car came out really, really nice.
The job ended up costing about $10K more than we anticipated on the estimate because after we stripped his car down, we found that it had more substantial rust than we thought.
All of this was discussed with the customer and he paid for the additional repairs beyond our initial estimate, even though he was uneasy about it.
After the work was done and he took the car home, he decided that we over charged him because some shop down the street from us (some ****ing hole in the wall) said they woulda done the work for half of what we charged.
So he sues us.
He tells the judge that we ripped him off because we charged him more than the original estimate and that our work wasn't good enough (bullshit, this car was immaculate and we had the pictures AND video to prove it).
He won the lawsuit for $15K.
Why?
Because even though the additional repairs were listed on the INVOICE and were paid for on the INVOICE, law requires it to be on the ESTIMATE first. Therefore, we over charged him based off of the initial estimate, even though he agreed and paid for the additional work.
On top of that, we're now on Rip off report because this dick bag went on there and spewed his bullshit story about how we ripped him off.
As a small business, we need a way to protect ourselves from this kinda bullshit.