Getting a bad review online is inescapable. What’s important is knowing how to handle these negative reviews when they come along, and learning how to turn a negative customer experience into a positive one. We’ve curated a list of 7 tips to help you through the recovery process.
What Happened?
Customers leave bad reviews to let it be known they are dissatisfied with your service, it’s never personal and never should be taken personally. However, each negative review should be taken seriously. If they start becoming more frequent, a plan needs to be devised to ensure a permanent solution is put in place so it stops.
Responding In a Timely/Professional Manner
Getting to the issue early shows the current customer and future customers that you are serious about rectifying the matter and you value your customers. It’s also very important that each response is personal, an automated response for each negative review can leave the impression that you don’t really care.
Be Sympathetic/Apologise
‘The customer is always right’ isn’t always the case. A few can be wrong, sometimes. Outright telling them this, could be fatal for your business. Apologizing and being sympathetic towards the customer gives them the impression that this isn't a natural occurrence and you are deeply sorry for the impact it may have caused.
Correct The Situation
Offering a gesture of goodwill whether it be a voucher for the customer to use on their next order or a discount code for them to save money with. Even offering the service they’d originally paid for, for free, goes a long way. It allows you to show the customer you’ve taken in their feedback and you’re owning the fact something went wrong on your side of the matter and you want to do everything in your power to solve things and better your business relationship. This is also an opportunity to get the customer to update their review and let it be known how things have changed and good efforts were made.
Communicate Offline
One thing a customer will always appreciate is the effort and time put in to reach out to them, whilst you can respond on the review platform they used, a phone call or personal email (if permitted) will stand out a lot more. It shows them you care but also makes them feel as though you really want to fix this and you’ll go the extra mile to make sure it is fixed.
Share Review With Colleagues/Correct Issue
Reviews are a perfect way to develop colleagues' service skills, and can be used as a part of store training whenever you feel an update is needed. They also let you know what is going right and what isn’t. Allowing you to highlight and improve on areas.
Correcting the problem allows you to strengthen your business/brand. You should absolutely take the chance to do so, as many aren’t given that second opportunity.
Making sure your customers are happy, will add value to your business and will help it flourish.
Drown it out with positive reviews
One negative review will be more impactful to your ratings if you only have a small number of reviews. Whereas one negative review amongst thousands of positive reviews will minimally affect your overall 5 star rating.
Hence why with CleanCloud, we give you our Review Module which allows you to send a ‘Review Request’ to all your customers after completing an order that you think has been a 5 star experience for them. Flooding your online profiles with positive reviews is the best way to gain traction and visits to your store, and increase those revenues to new heights.