As the old saying goes, you can please some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. And nothing proves that more than review sites on the internet. If you’ve gotten a bad review online, don’t panic; it happens to the best of us. The more important thing is how you handle it. Here are a few tricks to handling negative reviews that we’ve learned over the years.
- Do not go tit for tat and respond negatively. Put your customer service hat on and sympathize with the reviewer, then offer reconciliation.
- Responding soon after the review goes up will let your customers know that you care and that you listen to critiques.
- It’s ok to have a canned response. If you have a procedure for following up on negative reviews, your response can include the questions you need answered to reconcile the situation.
- The response that you send back to this review will tell the person who wrote the review as well as the rest of the world that you are a caring business who pays attention to what people think and feel. The person who sent this review will receive notification of your response and may choose to respond back.
- If the person who wrote this review chooses to contact you and resolve the issue, they have the power to remove the bad review and/or write a response to their own review telling about their positive experience. It’s ok to remind them of this.
- In writing your response, make sure to give the reviewer your contact information. If you don’t want your inbox flooded with responses to negative reviews, set up a separate email address just for this.
- Even if the reviewer is wrong in his or her accusation, offer some sort of apology. Your apology can be along the lines of “We hate that this is the impression our company left with you.” But show some sort of remorse nonetheless.
- Thank the reviewer for taking the time to share his/her experience since that helps you to make others’ experiences better.