You own a small business and work hard to impress your customers. You want to strive to improve even further, providing your customers with the best experience possible. You do this because you know it will help you to get more customers. If you have not done so, yet, you may want to take a look at the customer reviews for your business online. In most cases, you can learn a great deal about your home improvement business like this and you may even be amazed at how you can improve your business with the information you find there.

#1 – Learn About Your Employees

One of the easiest ways to benefit from managing your reviews online is that you’ll get a clear look at how your employees actually do. How well do they do their job? A simple review can easily tell you if they were on time, friendly, or rude. You may not like what you read, and you probably realize that most people only review companies to complain. Nevertheless, you could see a pattern of problems with your team. This can help your business to grow simply by showing you what your employees didn’t do properly.

#2 – Find Out What Customer’s Appreciate

Even more importantly, you can quickly learn what your customers like about your business especially when compared to other businesses in your industry. For example, you may notice a customer review that points out that your team did a great job following up on a job or went above and beyond on a customer request. These are key things to teach your employees to do all of the time to ensure they are not missing those key points with customers.

#3 – Is Your Service Really the Best?

Look one step further. Do you really get to say that your business is the best in the area? If you cannot say this is the case, it may be time to make some changes. To know, look at your customer reviews and those of your competition. What can you improve on? What are your areas of opportunity?

You may want to spend some time doing this on a regular basis. If you don’t want to worry about your online reputation, though, it may be best if you sought after a third party provider to help you to manage your business more effectively. You’ll find it is easily possible to learn and grow your business using these online reviews, if you put the time into reading them.

Mark van Berkel is Founder and President of Hunch Manifest Inc. While managing business operations he also leads the team in designing semantic technology to provide personalized online presence and reputation management services. Prior to forming the company, he was consultant in enterprise software projects to companies including Panasonic, Shell, and General Electric and was an Architect for a world leading human capital management software-as-a-service. Mark holds a Bachelor of Information Systems from StFX University and did his graduate studies at University of Toronto, getting a MEng Industrial Information Engineering and an MBA, Strategy and Innovation from the Rotman School of Management. In 2006 he published a 170 page report as a researcher at the Semantic Technologies Lab at the University of Toronto and built a semantic technology prototype for SAP Research Labs. Connect with Mark on LinkedIn or Twitter. Mark is also certified in Google Analytics.