Reputation Management 102: Dealing With Negative Reviews
By Stuart Hardy
Negative reviews are no longer just word-of-mouth amongst friends. Now these things can end up on the first page of the search engine results pages. If you have bad reviews, damage control kicks in! Where to start? What to say? How to say it? We’ll address these questions and more in this post.
The old adage, “The customer is always right”, comes into play here. While said review may not be entirely true you must be sensitive to the customer’s feelings and decipher what they are really saying. Were they unhappy with the service itself, or the way it was administered? Whatever their issue is, reach out to them as discreetly as possible. It is best to call or email them in order to work on resolving their issue. Sometimes, all that they want is an apology. Reaching out in as personal a method as a phone call or email is often the best part of your strategy.
Read more about when and how to respond to reviews here.
If a simple apology will not suffice you don’t need to “sell the farm”, but it doesn’t hurt to discretely offer something to them in order to help change or remove their review. We’d advise you to offer something that is comparable to the service or product that they were unhappy with. Again, being discreet is very important as many review sites tend to frown upon this practice, but sometimes this is the only way. Because of this, offering a free produce or service should be an absolute last resort.
Once you’ve been able to resolve the issue at hand, follow up is extremely important! If the review that they left cannot be removed be sure that you request that they alter their review and mention that you “made it right”. Ask them that they not include any details on anything that was given them free of charge, but that they are simply satisfied with their experience. If you can get them to remove or replace their negative review that would be your best case scenario.
Good luck out there! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email us at socialmedia@prosites.com. We’ll get right back to you!
Tags: Bad Reviews, Negative Review, 1 (One) Star, 2 (Two) Star, Yelp, Google