How to Handle Negative Reviews
How should you handle a negative review? Respond quickly and calmly, take the conversation offline, fix the customer's actual problem, and only then ask for the review to be updated or taken down. Reviews that break a review site's guidelines can be reported for removal. Anything that survives all of that is a job for an online reputation management system. This guide walks through each of those steps in the order that works, and explains why a negative review handled well often does more for your brand than a positive one.
"I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better." - Elon Musk
Why does customer feedback matter so much now?
With the world moving towards digitalization, customers give their valuable feedback on the products and services businesses offer. Feedback is the accurate measure that tells you and your brand what to improve. It arrives in the form of reviews, articles, blogs and of course comments on the social media platforms your brand engages on. Feedback is always considered an invaluable measure because it helps you think from the customer's perspective. And what better source than customers themselves conveying both the good and the bad aspects of the products or services you offer.
What makes an online review different from every other kind of feedback?
The most important form of feedback is the online customer review. Customer reviews sway genuine business results and the choices potential customers make about whether to patronise a business or walk past it. Much the same as their impact in the real world, reviews do not just give people a better idea of the adequacy and quality of a particular product or service, they reinforce a better than normal customer experience, which is something every customer is looking for. 88 percent of people have been influenced by an online customer service review when deciding what to buy. That is why a business must be accepting of and engaged with every customer review, good or bad, always. Responding to positive customer reviews is not actually worrisome. Negative reviews are the difficult ones, because harsh criticism is always hard to take.
Can you avoid negative reviews altogether?
No, and planning as though you can is the first mistake. Every business wants to see only positive reviews and comments about its products or services. The truth is that we do not live in a perfect world. You will get negative customer feedback however hard you try to please your customer, and there is no way around it. What you do have is a set of ways to tackle those reviews and turn them into positive engagement. So let us look at the ways to handle negative reviews.
What are the four steps for handling a negative review?
Respond pensively and swiftly
Customers often write negative reviews when they are angry about your product or service, but that anger should not come back from your end. Your response should be prompt, and it should be delivered in a swift, measured manner. Very few people are skilled at presenting criticism, so do not take a negative review as a personal attack and do not slide into self defence. It is obvious to want to react to negative feedback, but try to distance yourself from emotion and closed mindedness. Document the incident properly and work out how to handle it with positivity.
Take the issue offline
Never make your customers reach out to you again after they have posted a negative review. Take the issue offline yourself by asking for their email id or a personal contact number. Apologise for the displeasure your product or service caused them. The best part of taking the issue offline is that you can properly listen to the query and resolve it. This technique tells you clearly which imperfections to improve so you can come back stronger. Once you have resolved the query, you can take the extra step of offering compensation or a future discount. Remember to avoid doing that publicly, because it can cast a bad impression on your other existing or potential customers.
Request the review to be removed
Most customer review sites will not permit you to remove reviews yourself. In the case of one that is defamatory or denouncing, ask the site to take it down. Commonly, you will need to claim your business listing before making that request. After the query is solved you can also ask the customer to delete the review, so that it does not account for any further loss of customers.
Monitor your presence across the internet
In order to handle negative reviews, you first need to know what customers are saying and where they are saying it. Tools like Mention and Google Alerts are commonly used to monitor when and where people talk about your brand. You can leverage your social media handles to interact with customers and even ask them how happy they are with your product or service. This technique empowers customers to share good stories in the form of reviews while boosting the social media engagement of your brand.
What if the negative reviews still will not go away?
It might happen that after all of the steps above, negative reviews still sit there on your listings and your website, and at that point you need an online reputation management system in place. You will have understood by now that negative reviews hamper your online reputation in the longer run, so it is necessary to eliminate them. With outsourcing becoming the new normal, companies now consult reputation management agencies to handle negative reviews anywhere on the internet. Online reputation Manage is one such agency, with the industry expertise to run relevant review generation for you. It has the reputation management tools to monitor you and your brand's standing sensibly across the online community, which means blogs, articles, online forums, search engines and of course social media.
Want to boost your reputation today?
Send us the review that is hurting you and we will tell you honestly whether it can be removed, suppressed or answered. Drop us a line and keep in touch through the Contact Us page, or call a specialist directly on +91 8700 450 757.