What to do when you get a bad review
Businesses can and frequently do get bad reviews, regardless of how much care and effort you take. If your business is customer-orientated, it can be well worthwhile creating business pages on the various popular review directories in order to showcase your services. If you have a solid business concept with great customer service, your reviews will generally be overwhelmingly positive, so signing up to these websites can be hugely beneficial; they can be a vital part of your digital marketing strategy. But there’s not much you can do to prevent the occasional negative review, whether it’s through one of the traditional review sites like TripAdvisor or through social media like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. Thankfully, there are ways that you can respond in order to limit the damage to your business or improve where you’ve failed.
Responding quickly is key to managing the fallout from a bad review. You should respond to as many reviews as you can, including positive ones - that way when you do respond to negative ones, it doesn’t look out of the ordinary and desperate. Replying to all of them - even with a simple ‘thank you’ - is the best thing to do. Many customers who have given a negative review respond well to a simple acknowledgment that more needed to be done to meet their standards, which shows you’re taking them seriously. Even if, perhaps, you feel they were unreasonable in their criticism. New customers who browse review sites and see businesses engaging in an understanding way like this will be impressed. Treat feedback and reviews as free market research.
Sometimes on the internet, good-intentioned reviews can come across as blunt or rude, so remember to be polite and patient when replying. You also have to remember that you can’t please everybody, and all businesses will receive less than favourable reviews at some point. One perfectly legitimate response in some circumstances can be to simply walk away if you’re going round in circles in disagreements. If you feel that a review is spam, abusive, uses profanities, or violates the terms of the website or platform, you can contact an admin who can get it removed. But don’t use this as your go-to response to negative reviews. It can be easy to shout “troll” at any sign of criticism at your business. You should also keep in mind that sometimes people post reviews on the wrong page, mistaking your business for another one. This can be a regular occurrence if your company’s name is a common one. As with abusive reviews, you just need to inform an administrator who can rectify the situation by moving the review off your page and where it belongs.
Ultimately, you have to take each review as it comes. Negative reviews can often feel like a punch in the gut, especially when you’ve worked hard to build your business up. If you’re a particularly small business or a sole proprietor, it can even seem like a personal attack. Take a deep breath and try not to be rude, condescending, or sarcastic, because this could make things worse if people take your reply as representative of you and your business, there's nothing worse than a big public fallout with a customer on Social Media. Just be polite and remember that the chances are, you can turn the situation around and keep a customer, not to mention gaining new ones who’ve seen your excellent handing the situation.
