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Last Updated on December 28, 2020 by Work In My Pajamas
Online review sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, and TripAdvisor can greatly affect the success of your company. A few negative reviews amidst several hundred won’t destroy your business, but can carry significant weight if you don’t respond appropriately.
Negative Reviews Stand Out
While you may think a negative review from several years ago is gone and buried, it can stay with your business for much longer. Many review sites offer the option to filter by negative reviews. To the credit of these sites, most reviews are placed with the most recent review first. However, if a customer is researching your business, all it takes is a single click to find any negative reviews, even if they are years old.
Respond to Reviews
The first thing you should do is respond to the review. When possible, try to find the customer information to respond more intelligently. Don’t talk specifically about the situation, but you should be able to let the customer know you looked up their specific incident and are aware of any problems. This can go a long way toward satisfying an unhappy customer and letting others know you addressed things that go wrong.
Get Real
Sometimes you need to make a connection with a customer in the real world. When you’re not getting the type of response you want, ask the customer to come into the store to make things right. Provide your contact information online, and extend an olive branch to your customer to encourage them to contact you. This is often one of the best ways to ensure that customers feel they are being treated properly.
Maintain a Polite Attitude
No matter what, make sure you maintain a polite attitude. Even if you don’t agree with what the customer is saying, the goal is to appease them if possible to prevent further public backlash. Remember, a customer who has gone online to vent their frustration about your company is extremely unhappy. It takes some effort to make this type of complaint. Because current and future customers are watching to see how you handle any dispute, it’s important to remember to keep your pride and ego in check while you do your best to satisfy the customer.
Control the Conversation
There are online services can help you control the conversation (to a degree). Your competitors may be using online review sites to tarnish your reputation and the best thing to do in these situations is to have a system set up to direct your current and potential clients to share reviews. By using a service that ensures only real customers leave reviews, you can prevent most anonymous reviews. In some cases, you may even find a customer leaves a negative review for another company without realizing you’re not that company.
Prevent Abusive Reviews
Use a service that requires your customers to input a receipt number before leaving a review. This is essential since it curtails a lot of abuse. You can also actively advertise legitimate review sites on your own company website. Remember a negative review won’t destroy your business, but can go a long way to instilling faith in your customers that the other reviews are legitimate. While a competitor who wants to attack your business can still purchase a product and leave a review, there is a better paper trail to ensure legitimate complaints are handled effectively.
If you provide great customer service with every experience, and control your online presence, you should have fewer problems with negative reviews.
In summary, remember, it’s important to respond to all negative reviews. Even if the customer doesn’t accept your resolution, others will see that you reached out and were proactive. This alone can greatly increase your ability to maintain a highly active and thriving online presence.
