Negative reviews have a tendency to drive customers away from your site. In fact, 94 percent of shoppers say that a negative online review has convinced them to avoid a specific business.
Unfortunately, negative reviews happen. Even it frequently happens by Google my business reviews. The way you handle these reviews is one of the best indications of whether or not you will be able to resolve it and prevent the comments from impacting another customer’s willingness to shop with you.
Prevent Negative Reviews
The best thing you can do when it comes to negative reviews is to prevent them. How, you may wonder? One of the best ways is to put steps in place to allow your customers to directly contact you if they run into an issue. One way to do this is with a free ticketing system, or a live chat feature on the page. This helps resolve an issue before it escalates and leads to a full-on complaint.
Don’t Get Mad
It’s easy to take a negative review and become furious. However, this isn’t a good course of action. Even if the review is particularly negative or nasty, it’s your job to look past this to find the insight that may lie within.
Feedback – even negative feedback – is telling you something wasn’t done properly. However, it isn’t going to tell you what to do next. This is up to you. While you may be tempted to dismiss cranky reviews, it isn’t a good idea. Not only does this look bad to other customers, but you aren’t taking action on something that may be wrong with your business, product, process, etc.
Don’t Send a Passive Aggressive Response
The phrase “we’re sorry your having a problem…” is quite infuriating for any customer. This is nothing more than deferring who is to blame.
There are far too many companies that are using this type of language, with many not even realizing they are doing so. The attempt to apologize to the customer is going to seem dismissive – this is all due to a misuse of tone.
Just say that you are sorry – even in cases where the customer is not being reasonable. Apologize and find out how you can fix the issue. Even if you come across a situation that’s a lost cause, make sure to keep things friendly, professional and most importantly – keep things moving.
Respond in a Timely Manner
Remember this – a quick reply is one that won’t ever go out of style. If a customer is unhappy, then a speedy response is not only nice, it’s absolutely necessary.
Remember, a customer who leaves a feature request isn’t going to worry about how long it takes you to respond. However, those who are in a frustrating situation will demand a solution – yesterday. You need to make sure that responding to these individuals is a top priority.
It’s not possible to always make everyone happy. In the long run, even just trying to do this is going to lead to issues. As a result, you need to make sure you do everything in your power to prevent negative comments or reviews. If you can’t prevent them, don’t ignore them. Taking action immediately will help you resolve the issue and keep it from potentially changing the minds of other customers coming your way.
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Contributed content
Founder Dinis Guarda
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