In today’s age of social media and online reviews, it can be difficult to know how to handle negative reviews. What should you do? How do you respond? Should you even bother fighting back or just give up the ghost? In this post, we will explore what impact poor feedback has on your business, how to deal with it and what can be done to make the best of a bad situation.

The impact

The majority of customers now do almost everything online – using the web to conduct pre-purchase research, compare brands, prices and read about other people’s experiences.

It will come, therefore, as no surprise that having to read about people’s negative experience of your product and service will be off-putting for potential customers.

Negative reviews undermine your business’s reputation, drive customers away and will see your search engine ranking take a hit. If the business has more negative reviews than positive ones, you should expect to see profitability take a turn for the worst too.

What can I do if my business suffers from a negative review online?

1) A professional and prompt response

While it’s good practice to respond to any review quickly, I’d recommend that any negative review gets a response within 24 hours if you can – not only does it showcase that your business deals with problems when they arise, but that you deal with them in a prompt and professional manner.

Be warned, however, that it can become an argument if your tone isn’t right. While business versus customer fights can be humorous to the neutral outsider, for many potential customers it will turn them away because it shows your brand as one that responds in a difficult way. People can accept that things go wrong sometimes and your honest attempts to fix any dissatisfaction will go a long way – going tit for tat with a customer in the public domain is unlikely to bring in any serious business for your firm.

2) Prevention is better than the cure

It goes without saying that you should do everything you can before getting to the stage that a negative experience of your business has to be shown to the public.  To this end, make sure you have a system in place to deal with customer service complaints. If they are not handled properly then your company may well be put on the internet by unhappy customers – and that is never good for business!

A bad review can come from any of these sources – faulty goods, poor delivery or poor customer service.

But if this does happen, make sure you learn from the experience. You may realise that, upon honest reflection, the negative feedback was probably justified – in this case, you have a golden opportunity to review why it got to this stage and put in systems and processes to prevent it from happening again. Do explain how you’ve introduced changes in response to the feedback.

3) Encourage Positive Reviews

One really effective way of improving your score is by getting the customers who have had positive experiences of your business to leave a review reflecting this and thereby improving your average review score.

When asking for a review, think about the following:

• Is your request personalised? Give the reviewer a couple of reminders of what experiences you have given them.
• Is your request simple to follow? Consider creating a simple step-by-step guide or Loom video on how to leave the review.
• Thank them for their review. A simple thank you message for taking the time out to review your business go a long way.

4) Is the review genuine?

If you have never heard of this customer or it sounds very much like an attempt to derail your brand, it’s vital that you report this as malicious – most platforms do investigate this and will inform you of their decision making.

In Conclusion

Do not think of negative reviews as a bad thing. They are an opportunity to turn the customer’s experience around and make them feel valued in their feedback.

If you’re dealing with this, it is important that you get on top of your response quickly! It can be easy for these instances to escalate if left alone and have a crushing effect on your business’s reputation online.