Businesses in all sectors depend on customer’s reviews to determine if the company should improve its business practices or retrain their agents to provide better customer service. In recent years, Yelp has become a popular online review website for customers. Even lawyers and attorneys ask for their client’s honest opinion to find out if they are or are not handling court cases acceptably. However, Yelp has earned a bad reputation of only positing negative comments from fictitious customers. Let’s take for example a small business owner whose business is based in Virginia. Several negative reviews were posted on Yelp about his carpet cleaning business. One day the business owner had enough of the damaging comments, so he decided to hire a lawyer to fight back. The First Amendment protects anonymous reviews by patrons. However, the Virginia Court of Appeal ruled that the First Amendment does not cover intentionally false statements. Whenever you are using Yelp, please be aware of the false statements and remember that first “hands-on” experience is the best customer review.
Another Yelp case occurred about nine years ago. Mr. Green, attorney and owner of the Law Offices of Holden Green, began to notice negative reviews popping up on Yelp. The attorney contacted Yelp several times to dispute the negative feedback, with no success. So finally he told his clients to leave a review on Yelp and Google Reviews to see if he’ll get the same response. To his surprise, Google Reviews posted the customer’s review, but Yelp hid all of the positive comments! The Law Offices of Holden Green encourages you to report any and all anonymous reviews. A positive review from customers will build its credibility, but negative feedback will hurt your business and reputation.
