You will be surprised to know, 90 percent of customers in a survey stated that positive online reviews affected their buying decision. That’s not all, 86 percent customers said that their buying decision was influenced by negative online reviews. You can read more about the survey in this Marketing Land post.
Of course, you can get your customers to leave a positive review for your business online. But you cannot expect all your customers to be satisfied, especially if your business is solely consumer-oriented. Hence, you are sometimes bound to come across some unprecedented negative online reviews about your business. You have to live with it!
The following are a few major reasons that usually cause a negative online review for a business online:
- Product or service is not up to the expectations you created.
- Shipping and handling of products caused delay or damage.
- Customer service did not respond well to the customer’s queries.
This post is going to list out steps on how to manage your negative online reviews professionally. So, let’s start with the most important step, step #1.
(image credit: www.yelp.com)
Step #1 – Do Not Lose Your Cool
Do Not Lose Your Cool Over Negative Online Reviews
There is no denying that a negative online review can easily tarnish your brandreputation. Especially if you have many competitors and you run a small to mid-sized business. People tend to move on to a competitor business as soon as they come across a negative review online during their product/service research.
And no matter how hard you try to satisfy your customers, no matter how hard you work towards building a positive repute for your company, there is always a dissatisfied customer who will be prone to post a negative review. To you your business is your baby, but to the reviewer it is just another business that did not meet their expectations or, even worst, you had the bad luck to come across them in a bad day.
Whatever you do, do not lose your cool over it. Do not argue with the customer or burst out in a comment to get back at them for tarnishing your brand image. After all, these are online reviews and you do not know who else is watching.
Please do not be ‘that’ business owner, like the one shown in the screenshot below:
How You Are Not Supposed To Handle Negative Reviews (image credit – www.krem.com)
Reply to your online reviewer only after you have calmed down. It will be way more effective.
Step #2 – Know Which Negative Online Reviews To Respond To
If your business is completely customer-based, there are chances that there are a myriad of online reviews about your business on the web. You cannot personally handle all the negative reviews out there or at least not immediately.
You must know which type of negative reviews you must respond to and which type of negative reviews you must ignore and of course which ones should be your priority:
The ones that need a response as soon as possible are as follows:
- Legitimate Concerns: Just by reading a negative review you know whether it has been caused by completely or partially your fault. These are legitimate concerns that you must take care of promptly.
- Registered Complaints: These are reviews from your customers who were decent enough to register the complaint first with you before blasting out in public.
- High Profile Reviewers: Reviews from customers who are in the habit of often posting reviews on third-party sites. These are customers you want to watch out for as they have built a high reputation on these sites and their reviews would be taken seriously.
- Reviews On Popular Sites: These are reviews that are popular, such as Yelp. Your potential leads are probably researching for the products and services you offer and the first thing they find on Google search are reviews from popular sites such as these.
The ones that usually do not need a response, are as follows:
- Fake Reviews: By reading a review you can often make out whether it was from a genuine customer or a competitor or a frustrated former employee.
- Reviews On Personal Blogs: If someone has blogged negatively about your business, depending on the intensity of the review you may or may not want to address the blogger.
- Funny Reviews: Sometimes some reviews do not make sense, they use negative words but their grammar and language is used incorrectly. It usually looks like someone has outsourced posting online reviews to a non-English speaking country.
Also, if the review is illogical or really not that serious, for instance, take a look at the screenshot below:
Funny Negative Customer Reviews Online (image credit – www.amazon.com)
Most of your learned customers are smart enough to ignore such reviews, so you can do too.
Step #3 – Request For Fake Negative Review Removal (If Any)
Fake reviews or reviews from someone who does not want your business to flourish, can be requested to remove from third-party sites. However, the catch here is, you need to provide evidence that these reviews are fake.
If you are lucky, sites such as Yelp might voluntarily filter some reviews as spam, but some fake reviews may still escape their radar. In such cases, collect evidence and write a professional letter (in a polite tone) to have these reviews removed.
If it is a review from a third-party website that reflects on your Google+ Local page too, it will be automatically deleted once it is removed from the third-party site in concern.
Step #4 – Address The Root Cause Of The Problem
Most of the genuine negative reviews from customers online come from a failed first attempt to get their complaint solved through customer service.
Check if there is a registered complaint and make sure the customer service rendering staff who the customer originally approached with their problem, does not fail to address customer complaints ever again. In other words, improve your customer service immediately.
Step #5 – Address The Negative Reviews
When you are done with filtering the fake reviews from the genuine ones, you need to address the latter.
There are two ways to address the negative online reviews.
- Address and solve them right on the third-party site
- Address and solve them via email or phone
Address the customer on the third-party review site and tell them that a particular staff (offer his/her name) will soon get in touch with them via email or phone.
Offer to address the concern via email or phone when the concern cannot be solved immediately on the third-party review site. Sometimes these reviews can also show up in your social media brand pages, for e.g. Facebook. In such cases, when you address the problem and go round and about the concern for a few days on Facebook public posts, there are chances that other fans may also participate. This results in loss of focus on the primary complaining customer.
On the other hand, offering an immediate solution to the problem of the customer then and there on the third-party site can also work for you pretty good.
Say for example, you face a customer that posted a negative online review about the faulty delivery of your product, a 55 inch LED TV, with damaged panels. You address the customer most graciously and show empathy towards their concern. You then go ahead and offer to replace the piece after offering to pick up the product from their house.
Tell all that you would do for your customer right on the site where they have complained. The way you approached the issue is seen by many others who visit the review site. You end up in building a good impression for future readers of the review.
Step #6 – Fix The Problem With Deserved Compensation
Remember, not everyone takes their time from their busy schedule to write a review for your business. But if someone does write a negative review for you, they are probably also expecting you to do something about it.
If you think the mistake is completely on your side you must not waste any time in offering some compensation for the trouble you have put your customers through. But you may not want to reveal the compensation publicly (as it may attract many others to get free gifts or compensation from you with fake claims of poor service).
Just make sure that once you have compensated for your faulty product or service to your reviewer, humbly request them to drop another quick review saying that the matter was resolved.
Step #7 – Get More Positive Reviews
What you need to know now, is how does getting positive online reviews help manage your negative online reviews.
Imagine you are researching for the best android phone model in the market. You read a list of reviews for your shortlisted models and among that list are 10 negative reviews along with 100 positive reviews. Would you still choose that product? Chances are, you will.
It is simple logic a good amount of positive reviews about a given service or product, the miniscule number of negative reviews easily get overlooked. Besides, having a small portion of negative reviews on the product/service makes the other positive reviews look more natural and not manipulated.
One last advice is never to write your own positive reviews or ask a relative, friend or an agency to do it. Some businesses think that they could get away with overshadowing of negative reviews with fake positive reviews. Getting caught in such situations will lead to consequences worse than having a negative review in the first place.
Take a look at the following screenshot, courtesy Yelp’s blog post titled Consumer Alerts: because you might like to know.
Yelps Warning About Fake Reviews To Consumers (image credit: officialblog.yelp.com)
It is very important that you pay attention to what is being said about your brand, product or service on the web.
Use social media tracking tools such as SocialMention or Google Alerts to get alerts for your brand mentions every once a week or a month. This will keep you on the know of any negative comments being said about your business on the web.
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