You’ve got a great product and provide great service. Your customers love you and have given you great reviews. Look at all those five stars! You share them, there’s nothing wrong with that, right? Well, there might be. Let’s talk about reviews. Hi, my name is Bruce Walker and you’re watching, Botsplash TV.

When you shop, you probably look at reviews before you buy. The better the rating, the better the product, right? Well, it’s possible the reviews that you are reading aren’t real or you’re not getting the full story.

In March of 2022, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or CFPB issues policy guidance regarding potentially illegal practices related to consumer reviews. They stated that banks and financial companies cannot prohibit consumers from writing bad or honest reviews.

They also stated that banks and financial institutions can’t buy reviews or have employees write reviews of products and services they haven’t used.

And they also stated that it’s unfair and wrong for companies to suppress or manipulate reviews that may confuse consumers, like only displaying five star reviews and none of the one and two star reviews.

This follows from when the Federal Trade Commission put hundreds of businesses on notice in October of 2021 about fake reviews and other misleading endorsements.

So if you’ve got great reviews definitely share them, but make sure you’re sharing all your reviews, even the bad ones. Because if you don’t, you could find yourself in trouble with the FTC and CFPB. Use the bad reviews as incentive to improve your business. Good marketers can turn those negative reviews positive by engaging with their customers and learning how to improve their processes creating trust.

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I’m Bruce Walker, and thank you for watching, Botsplash TV.