Whilst tackling my overgrown garden yesterday, I got to thinking about how I could support my fellow indies in this strange lockdown time (Home Front Solution 43: Get Involved in the Bigger Picture). We clap for our key workers and donate for nurses but what could I do to help a business?

I always try to find an independent alternative when I want to buy something new, whether I trawl through Etsy to have something posted or wander into town to get what I need from a bricks and mortar shop, but I don’t need to buy much at the moment and a trip to my high street isn’t really an option with everything going on.

So I turned it around and thought what could my customers do for me? and whilst I was entangled in a particularity prickly bramble it came to me, reviews!

We live in a time now when word of mouth is spread a little further than just telling people you meet about the great service you have received from a company, it can be laid bare for the whole of the internet to read by way of online review and it is such an easy and free way for you to give your favourite places a little boost.

From little online sellers to big restaurant chains, reviews can be the deciding factor in a customer using a business, especially new ones. They want to know if a business is trustworthy and the items they sell are good quality/tasty and online reviews are the way so many of us work that out but what surprises me is how rare we, as customers, write one ourselves.

We recently got our first chickens and the service we received was excellent, the couple answered all of our questions and gave us the time we needed to pick the right girls. We weren’t the only happy customers that day as we heard 2 other people gushing about the excellent service as they collected their birds, so we were pretty surprised to find out they only have 6 reviews on google when we did a little search. We wanted to tell anyone we could find how amazing these guys were and thought everyone else would want to too.

Writing a couple of sentences down about your experience with a cafe, shop, hairdresser, mechanic, secondhand furniture seller won’t take up hardly any of your time but can mean the world to that business. Not only does it helps new customers trust them, it can also fill them with a little bit of love as nice to know their efforts are appreciated.

You can leave reviews on Google by searching for companies and clicking the review tab or on many facebook pages on the review tab on the left hand side.

A little note on bad reviews. I think you should contact the business separately and try every option you can for working through your issues before posting a bad review online. A business shouldn’t be judged on the mistake they make but how try and fix it and I believe you can’t review a service until you’ve given them that chance.

So take that 5 minutes today to type out as many compliments as you can think of to your favorite brands. It really could make all the difference 🙂

This blog is part of my Do Your Bit series all about the things you can do to make the world a little brighter and better, read more at Do Your Bit

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