There’s always going to be positive and negative reviews about your business. If you want to keep your online reputation positive, responding to reviews is one of the best things you can do.
The importance of reviews
Customers trust deeply on reviews to help them make purchasing decisions. In fact, 92% of consumers read reviews before making a purchase (Spiegel Research Center, 2017). And 85% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations from friends and family (BrightLocal, 2017).
In other words, you can’t skip to not track your reviews.
Reviews are a great way to get feedback. Even the negative ones. You can use both positive and negative reviews to twist your offer, improve your service, and improve the customer experience.
Why Respond to Negative Reviews
So, now you know that reviews are important to your brand. Let’s check why respond to negative reviews is important:
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- Make things correctly
- Demonstrate other potential customers that you care
- Show off your brand’s human side
Make Things Correctly
Sometimes replying to a negative review is the only opportunity you’ll have to make things right with an unhappy customer. While many unhappy customers won’t talk to you directly about their problems, they’re likely to leave a review.
You can use the negative review as a chance to get more information about what went wrong so you can make it better and hopefully, keep it from happening again.
Demonstrate Potential Customers You Care
How you handle negative reviews shows potential customers what they can expect from doing business with you.
Additionally, having a mix of positive and negative reviews is much more credible than a business that has page after page of nothing but glowing admiration.
Show Off Your Brand’s Human Side
As we’ve already implied, negative reviews can actually make your brand seem more human. A business with nothing but positive reviews may come off as fake or “too good to be true,” but consumers know that negative reviews happen.
How you respond to those negative reviews is what lets consumers know if people want to do business with you.
How to Respond to Negative Reviews
Faults happen. Unfortunately, in the business world, those mistakes are typically followed up with negative evaluations.
Here’s a suggestion of how to respond to negative comments to:
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- Investigate the problem
- Make an apology
- Empathize with the reviewer
- Offer an explanation
- Don’t fight
- Take the conversation offline
- Add progress update
- Request an update review
Step 1. Investigate the Problem
When you first get a negative review, you’ll probably be triggered about it. That’s a usual response to negative criticism.
Before you start firing off a answer, though, take the time to think about what the reviewer is saying.
Try to approach the situation from the customer’s point of view. Where did you fail to meet their expectations?
Once you have an understanding of the problem you can start working on your response.
Step 2. Apologize
Start your response with an apology even if you didn’t do wrong. An unhappy customer wants to feel better and wants to feel seen, so let them know that you care about their experience.
Step 3. Empathize with the Reviewer
After your apology, it’s time to use that human empathy to relate with your unhappy customer.
Put yourself in your customer’s place and think about how you’d feel in their situation. What would you want to hear from the business?
Approach the situation from the perspective of the customer.
Step 4. Offer an Explanation
You should always be able to tell the customer what happened to create their bad experience.
This does not mean that you’re excusing what happened.
On the contrary, you’ll want to take the time to emphasize your understanding of where the process broke down for the customer and use it as an chance to gain a better understanding of how you might be able to keep this situation from playing out in the future.
Step 5. Don’t Fight
Regardless of what happens, don’t get into an argument with the reviewer.
Stay professional and objective. Remember that you’re never just addressing a single person. There are other people reading how you handle a difficult situation.
When you’re argumentative, you’re letting the reviewer and everyone else reading the reviews that you don’t care about their experience.
Invite the unhappy reviewer to discuss the problem out of the review thread. Getting them on the phone or speaking one on one via email will help you get any clarifying information you need and better understand the problem and your business’s role.
Step 6. Take the Conversation Offline
As we mentioned in the previous step, try to get the conversation out of the review thread.
Chances are, you’re not going to solve the problem with your first response. In your first response to the review, give the reviewer options to speak with you to get the complaint resolved.
You don’t have to go into a lot of detail in your response.
Step 7. Add a Progress Update
You should add a progress update to the review even if the customer does not contact you for a customized assistance.
If they never reached out to you, your update can sound like:
“Hi! We haven’t heard from you about this, but We’d still love to help resolve this issue. Please give us a call or email us when you’re ready!”
This shows others who are reading reviews for your business that you’re taking steps to resolve the problem and are leaving avenues of communication open if the unhappy customer wants to reach out.
Step 8. Request an Updated Review
If you successfully reach a solution that makes the negative reviewer happy, you should ask if they’re willing to update their review.
Many reviewers will be glad to make these updates because you’ve helped them and you’ve left them with a warm feeling about your business.
If you want to get serious about your brand’s reputation, you need the best reputation management service. In Thundermedia we have experience helping our customers managing their online social media and other public platforms.
You can click here if you would like to have a free marketing evaluation for your business.