Curtis Boyd is the CEO/Founder of Future Solutions Media, an online reputation firm based out of Los Angeles. He’s also the CEO of Objection Co., that companies hire to determine if certain negative online reviews contravene a site’s terms of agreement, and lobby the site to take it down.
Tell me about Objection Co.?
Curtis Boyd: We do create content but it goes to the administrators of the review site within dispute form, or review removal queries. So, Objection Co is a review removal strategy. It’s automated. If a customer publishes a 1-star, 2-star, or 3-star review for your business, most review software will just give you a notification saying, ‘Hey, so and so left you a bad review’. The end. Objection Co goes one step beyond that and says, ‘Hey, you got a 1-star review, but here’s how to get it removed.’ And it is specific to the site, as well as the content. If our server reads the review and thinks that it might qualify for removal, we’ll let you know how to remove it based on where it is and what it says. Objection Co is fully automated.
And, what is Feature Solutions Media?
Curtis Boyd: Feature Solutions Media is an online reputation management company. We are consultants. We will work with businesses to achieve their online reputation goals. That usually involves setting them up on some sort of reputation software. We do more of a white glove service – where we will do the removals for companies.
Generally, when a company calls us, they have issues. Normally, it’s bad reviews, and they want us to address it. We will submit the removal disputes for them.
Future Solutions Media will help you implement new protocols to get your customers to share good reviews online, and will help you respond to negative reviews. We do digital PR. We do a bunch of different stuff, depending on what a company’s goals are.
What’s an example where a business had you intervene with a customer?
Curtis Boyd: I always recommend to our customers, before you have us dispute it, try to work with the customer to bring them back in, so that you can turn their experience around. Most of the customers I work with do provide 5-star experiences and are earning their reputations.
An example of that would be one of our customers, they do HVAC. They had a 1-star reviewer. The consumer wrote a five paragraph review on Yelp about how this company way trying to rip them off.
The company asked me to reach out to this customer on their behalf, to try to work with them, to get them to update their review. I explained to the customer that when you shop around for prices, you can expect to find anything under the sun – similar to buying a car. You can find yourself at a Honda dealership, or you can find yourself at the Ferrari dealership. While Ferraris are well known for being expensive, this company is also more expensive because it offers a higher quality service. They don’t compromise on their price, because they know what they need to charge.
When I explained this to the customer, they totally got it. They felt really bad about the review. They immediately changed their review to say, ‘This company reached out to me, and explained why they charged so much, and I ended up going with them.’
What we offer is a way to listen to your customers – listen to what they are saying, get their feedback, to improve your customer satisfaction scores.
The sooner you make it right, the better.
How would you recommend a B2B increase customer loyalty?
Curtis Boyd: What we’ve found out works really well in building rapport and increasing customer retention are our monthly videos. We create about 45 second to one minute videos of our customer reports, and send them from our account representative. We found that we got a great response from that. People like to know that their account is being looked after. Even though it’s attached as a PDF as well, they really like the videos. That is something that I would highly recommend. There are companies to do that, but it’s so easy to have your own reps do it.
You ask for client feedback over text, not email – why?
Curtis Boyd: Because the engagement rate is greater. Email’s engagement rate has steadily dropped from 2012 to 2018 from 60% to 25%. I believe there is a lot of customer deafness when it comes to customer satisfaction emails. Consumers, every day, are being bombarded by satisfaction surveys. Especially while they are traveling, on the road, just bought something somewhere – ‘how did we do, how did we do?’ They become deaf to the situation, so we try to set ourselves apart a little bit. One of those ways is by using text message. We find that using text message creates a much better engagement rate. More customers are likely to write you a review if you send them a text message, verses an email.
Is it always a bad thing to have an “OK” but not excellent online review?
Curtis Boyd: There is nothing wrong with reviews or user content that include a helpful or constructive criticism. I’m all for it. Me, I would be fine with seeing reviews that had a helpful tip. Because, I would probably use that in our sales wording – somewhere on our landing page – so people know that we’ve overcome something.
