How do I respond to a negative review?
No one is perfect. We have off days, a project does not go as intended, or sometimes you find yourself working with a difficult customer. Positive and negative reviews impact consumers interactions with a business. That is why it is our goal to ensure that your business has a review response strategy in place. Having a sound strategy towards responding to negative reviews is not solely about saving face and damage control. In fact, this can be an opportunity to show current and future customers your excellent customer service skills. It also demonstrates to search engines like Google and Bing that you are dedicated to providing the best possible customer experience. Remember, search engines are all about providing the best possible customer experience to searchers. Here is how we will win with a strong review response strategy:
1.) Respond in a timely manner. This indicates that you care about your customer and that you are concerned with the negative as well as the positive experiences. How soon should you respond? Within 24 hours is ideal. This indicates to review sites that you are on it, that you care and that you are taking action to remedy the situation. By not responding in a timely manner (i.e. 1 to 2 weeks) you are having a negative review linger out there for the public to see with no response. This erodes your credibility to search engines and to prospective customers as it shows that you are not actively monitoring reviews, and that you are not engaged with your customers.
2.) Thank your customer for their feedback. Take the higher ground and thank your customer for their feedback. Sure sometimes this can be simple complaining, but they might also be giving you insight to a problem in your service. For example, maybe there’s a particular employee that is being referenced for providing poor service. That feedback is a tremendous help to your business as it helps pin point the problem, and potentially changes your hiring and training processes. You don’t have to over do it, we all know how to sniff out bs. Instead offer something like this “I appreciate your honest feedback of the service (insert company name here) provided.” Or "Thank you (insert customer name) for taking the time to provide constructive feedback in regards to the service (insert company name) provided on (insert date).
3.) Apologize and take ownership. Even if it’s not your fault, take ownership, just say “I’m sorry”. In forms of ownership, it should always come from the top. So when you sign off, add the name of the owner. For example “Shane Doudy, Owner Odyssey Marketing Group” Even if you as the owner didn’t write the response, don’t use jargon like “customer care” or “customer service” those titles are too generic these days. The main takeaway is to make sure your customer believes that an action to remedy the situation will happen and that their concern is being handled by the very top of your organization.
4.) Offer a solution, not an excuse. Stay away from offering an excuse, even if the excuse is valid. When something is damaged or didn’t go right, we want to fix it, not bring up the past. Your customer wants you to get to the point, so offer them something that would fix their problem.
5.) Take the conversation offline. You want to keep your response clear and concise. Offer a way for your customer to get in touch and set a reminder to follow up with your customer. You don’t want to hash out the details on a review platform. Your customer might get more angry having their full backstory on their personal experience published online.
Every business will run into this issue at some point. It’s important to approach bad reviews as a chance to improve internal processes and the customer experience. This is not all about appeasing your customer with a negative experience, but also demonstrating to prospective customers that you take feedback and customer experience seriously. In turn, you will benefit from search engines seeing your review interaction rate and rewarding you for actively managing all reviews and not cherry picking the positives.
