Stop Being Afraid Of Negative Reviews, How To Handle Them

Stop Being Afraid Of Negative Reviews, How To Handle Them

Bad reviews are going to happen, they are an unpleasant part of running a business. Taking precautions and using appropriate language to engage with negative feedback is necessary and professional. If someone leaves you a terrible review, here’s how to approach, prevent, and handle the situation.

 

Have The Right Frame

First and foremost, approach each disgruntled customer with an open mind. Remember that in a best-case scenario, the person will have a more positive view of your business after a resolution. So, keep in a mind a happy ending is possible.

An experienced manager might jump to conclusions thinking “they are just fishing for a refund” but more than likely, an unhappy customer implies there was a mismatch between the product or service delivered and initial expectations. There are exceptions outside your control like weather conditions, lockdowns, a mechanical failure, or technical glitch, but not likely…

Preventative Measures

Ensure your product or service is marketed appropriately for its price and quality. Also, make sure staff are properly trained.  Employees are the ones meeting the customer face-to-face and need to deliver a solid, undeviating, professional experience. Customers may say lots of outlandish things, but the employee should stick to being professional and polite.

Dilute negative reviews with positive ones using a software like irevu.com. Irevu is a review management platform that makes it easy for businesses to accrue multiple of their existing reviews. Leaving a review is made easy for customers thanks to Irevu seemingly integrating with most POS systems otherwise offering its own solutions.

Root out possible causes of a negative review by prompting a customer feedback survey after each purchase. Or simply push out a survey using Sendbat, a platform that seamlessly sends emails to all your contacts. Regardless of your survey results, here are the most common customer complaints: slow service, product out of stock, low quality product or service, no resolution, no follow-up.

Solutions to these common issues are as follows: for slow service, consider using a live chat software like Convosio, a live chat platform. More and more individuals are switching to live chat as their preferred contact method because it’s fast. In fact, already over 90% of millennials use live chat as their preferred communication channel, this gives both the customer and staff alike time to articulate their problem and solution.

For issues with tracking inventory to ensure product is always in stock, there’s Morix, an advanced warehouse management system.

For product and service quality, that’s on you, just keep asking for feedback from customers and don’t stop making improvements. There must always be a resolution and follow up, this goes into the actual response itself.

Responding To A Negative Review

You must respond every post, ignoring a negative review will send a message that you don’t care about customers and that will be viewed badly by readers looking to use your product or service.

Take a deep breath before responding. If you are a proud business owner, giving your best effort, it might make you feel angry that someone did not appreciate the product or service. Do not respond to a negative review in a state of anger, it could backfire. That said, the quicker you respond the better, just take a breath and articulate your response tactfully. Remember, what was said before “approach each disgruntled customer with an open mind”, your unhappy client could be pleasantly surprised that you cared to reply quickly and empathetically.  One way to answers reviews fast is again by using Irevu, where all reviews are gathered in one place. One can see detailed review reputation statistics from all over the web in one central dashboard at your fingertips which even gathers keywords to help you find out more about your business and its performance.

Accept responsibility for customers dissatisfaction, you want them to return, and more importantly you don’t want to lose the business of any spectators reading the review response. Do no try and shift the blame onto the customer, that will end horribly, and apologize if your staff made a mistake, the software glitched, or the product malfunctioned.

Be personal and unique, while this strategy is mostly understood to be used when responding to positive reviews, it’s necessary for unhappy customers as well. Address them by name or the experience they suffered.

Offer a solution and do not be late about it, if there is no immediate solution, offer a time and date to which you’ll follow up. Many companies allow issues or complaints to fall through the cracks and deal with them later. This is a horrible strategy that does not differentiate your enterprise from anyone else’, remember, you must be professional. Clartick is an excellent ticketing software used to collect and organize declared problems and get them assigned to resolution staff asap. Using such a software ensures problems are followed up on time and closed out chronologically. There’s no chance of losing site of an issue since everything is visible in one central dashboard and multiple notifications are sent to both the assigned employee and the manager.

End each response by saying how you take customer service very seriously along with your name and title, this way the customer has a contact to reference for further assistance or feeling understood, both of which help build a connection and reoccurring business.

Conclusion

Now you know how to prevent and troubleshoot negative review situations that can threaten your brand. So, stop having negative thoughts that angry customers are attempting to snub your business with ill intentions of “I’m going to get even with this place!” Just stay positive and continue to focus on delivering an optimal product or service.