How to best respond to negative reviews of your business?
Occasionally no matter how hard you try someone will be dissatisfied with the product or service you offer.
Your response is crucial for your business and its continued success.
An important thing to tell yourself is that your response is written for your current and future customers, not the person who left the negative review. The response emphasizes your business’s commitment to excellent customer service and your concern about their satisfaction. Anyone reading their review and your response knows they are dealing with a professional company that listens to customer feedback and does the right thing for their customers even when occasionally things go wrong.
Responding to reviews sets you apart from your competitors as many don’t respond to positive or negative reviews.
Remember, when dealing with someone unhappy with your company, it is important to respond quickly to triage the situation. Ideally, guide the customer to reach a resolution by encouraging them to delete or adjust their review upwards.
Step 1- identify the root cause of the issue. Find their order or account and determine what went wrong. Is their complaint legitimate? Have you received similar complaints? Can you fix their situation? Can your company change so the same complaint does not happen again?
Step 2- If unclear about their complaint reach out to them to get more details,
Step 3- Remedy the solution and politely ask the customer if they might modify or delete their negative review.
How to proactively prevent negative reviews.
The best way to deal with negative reviews is not to have any. Of course, you won’t be able to leave every customer satisfied, but not every unhappy customer will leave a bad review. Strategies like transparent communication and being authentic, even humble, can help prevent customers from becoming so disgruntled that they write negative reviews. We all have made mistakes; admitting you are not perfect is a good idea.
Monitor your incoming Google reviews and respond to every review.
Actively engaging with your customers, implementing changes when you receive constructive criticism, being committed to customer satisfaction, and dealing with and responding to issues and complaints when they arise will prevent negative reviews. Training your staff to be sensitive to customer issues and employees should be recognized when they salvage a bad situation and leave the customer happy. The short-term cost to satisfy the customer is worth the effort. The unhappy customer will cost you a lot more in the long run.
Doing all the above and running your core business is a lot to handle so I recommend you always try to get reviews from your happy customers to dampen the impact of any bad review you receive.
A great way to do that is with Reprenu, an affordable, mostly automated system that takes care of the difficult parts for you.
We provide you with a review card or cards if you are a service business or a review plate if you are a brick-and-mortar business with a cash register. Both have NFC technology and QR codes easily allowing your happy customers to leave a positive review on the spot. These are designed to grab the visitor’s attention and to obtain an immediate review.
Those positive reviews are immediately displayed on your website.
A review gateway can be set up if you are concerned about an occasional negative review. Thumbs up takes them to your Google Review Page and a Thumbs down takes them to a customer contact form. You are notified of both good and negative reviews.
Ai then produces the perfect review responses based on the customer’s review that puts your business in the best possible light. You can review the response prepared and post it or edit it if necessary.
Automatically, positive reviews can be attractively designed and displayed on your Facebook and Instagram pages to create interest in your product or service.
Check out our diagram below and our demo links.
