How to Not Be an A%$ When Responding to Negative Reviews
Today, it’s essential to respond to negative reviews on Facebook, Yelp, Google, and any social review platform that your customers might find you on. Why?
If you don’t respond to a negative review, people assume the complaint is true and reflects the way you typically do business. What’s worse, other customers may think you don’t care that another customer had a bad experience. It reflects poorly on your brand and business values.
You lose an opportunity to win the user back and get them to change or take down the review.
When you respond regularly to both positive and negative reviews, your ratings can improve.
According to a study conducted by Harvard Business Review, businesses that begin responding to reviews see their ratings get better.
Here are our golden rules & checklists for how to respond to a negative review:
DO assign ownership of the process.
The process doesn’t need to be complicated, but reviews DO live at the intersection of marketing, operations and social media. Clarifying who oversees responding to reviews is important not just because it simplifies the process—it will also increase your review response time, a key success metric.
Whoever steps up as the head of your review response program should understand the guidelines of each review site, be able to transform the collected feedback into valuable insights for your company, and — perhaps most important of all — display the right tact needed to address complaints and represent the brand well.
DO respond in a timely manner.
50 percent of customers who write reviews expect a response in seven days or less. 1 in 4 have an even shorter time frame: they expect to hear back from the business within three days.
Set up review alerts on Facebook, Google & Yelp so you are notified of new reviews.
Remember: the clock begins ticking once reviews are posted, and users are waiting to hear back from you.
DO own the complaint, the right way.
1. Start by addressing the reviewer’s primary complaint:
“I’m so sorry to hear that you are unhappy with our community event last week.”
2. Whether the fault was yours or not, you can sympathize with their feelings. Next, you want to convey that theirs was not a typical experience:
“We’re known for exceptional family-friendly events and I’m disappointed to learn that we missed the mark here.”
3. Thank the reviewer for giving you the chance to improve:
“I would like to speak with you more about it, if you could give me a buzz directly at XXX-XXX-XXXX. Thank you for bringing this situation to our attention so we can do better.”
4. If the problem was truly your fault, you can include a few words about how you plan to make things better.
DO work it out with the reviewer
Many times, people post negative reviews because they want to get your attention to fix their problem. When you do manage to fix the situation, you can often get the reviewer to modify their comments or take down the review entirely. Of course, that’s good for your online reputation, but don’t forget that you also have a chance to have a customer refer you to others (both online and through word-of-mouth).