Responding to Negative Reviews: 5 Essential Tips

As a business owner, you know just how important good reviews are. You want to provide the best customer/client experience possible to ensure you have a plethora of great customer reviews over time. Unfortunately, you can’t always make everyone happy. 

Mistakes happen and there will be an unhappy customer/client from time to time. When this happens, there’s a chance they could leave a negative review online about your business. Don’t panic and don’t ignore it. 

Responding to negative reviews is just as important as responding to positive ones. The trick is understanding how to respond to these customer complaints in a correct manner. Continue reading below to learn several helpful tips for responding to negative business reviews. 

1. Always Respond 

When you find a negative review, you might feel tempted to ignore it. The last thing you want to do is argue with a customer on the internet or have them go into further detail about their complaint on a platform where anyone can see it. However, not responding to it can cause just as much damage.

The first rule in review management is always to respond quickly and acknowledge the customer’s complaint to show other potential customers that you take complaints seriously. 

2. Start by Apologizing

When beginning your response, be sure to apologize to the customer for having a bad experience and take accountability for the error, mistake, or problem. You need to let this customer know that you care and want to make things right. Although it can be frustrating to find a negative review about your business, put your emotions to the side. 

Remain professional and try to see the situation from their standpoint. 

3. Create a Short and Simple Response

As you’re writing your response, refrain from asking questions or going into too much detail about the situation. This could cause the customer to react in a negative way and then lead to even more negative feedback posted online. Instead, keep your response to about three sentences long and avoid using the business name. 

Writing the business name in the response could cause it to come up in search engine results when searched for. 

4. Guide the Conversation Offline

The negative review is already public, so responding is crucial. However, quickly add a suggestion in your response to move the conversation to another platform. This suggestion doesn’t need to seem like you don’t want others to read it but more so that you can better help them. 

For example, you might ask them to email you with more information about what happened so you can better look into it and sort it out. 

5. Make Things Right

Once the conversation is taken into a private setting, you can then speak with the customer and provide a possible solution. Depending on the circumstances, a refund or free product/service might be due. Do what’s needed to turn the negative situation into a positive one. 

Listen to the customer and ensure you can correct the problem to continue receiving their business. Then, they’ll hopefully update their online review for others to see it was handled well. 

Responding to Negative Reviews Has Never Been Easier

It’s not a topic many business owners want to discuss, but at times it’s necessary. With these helpful tips, though, responding to negative reviews has never been easier. Use the information provided above to help you manage any type of business review. 

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