Dealing with Poor Customer Reviews – Sam Makad
If you’re a business owner, you know the value of goodwill and word-of-mouth. Your customers’ feedback has more value than anything else. Customer feedback and reviews help improve products and services. They measure customer satisfaction, create a better customer experience and aid in customer retention. These are just some of the reasons why it’s important to ensure that your customers are providing positive reviews and feedback.
But there are times when customers provide poor reviews. Perhaps there were customer issues or concerns that weren’t resolved to their satisfaction. You’ll want to deal with these kinds of customer reviews in a way that doesn’t harm the customer relationship. Here are a few ways to do this:
1. Respond promptly.
According to an online survey by Zendesk, more than 8% of people were influenced by online customer feedback and reviews before buying any services or products.  Unfortunately, it isn’t always possible to prevent customers from providing negative reviews if they face unresolved issues or are unsatisfied with the product or services they paid for. One of the best ways to protect your business in these situations is to ensure you respond promptly.
Today’s customer support executives can use a variety of technologies, like co-browsing and live chat, to respond almost immediately to any customer’s negative review or feedback. While the best way is to write or call the customer personally, it is important to perform this step carefully.  We’ll discuss this in more detail later. Sometimes a problem cannot be resolved with just a phone call or mailing. In that case, what do you do? Â
Imagine that you have a real-estate customer who is using one of your software products to post their houses/properties on a website. If they experience a problem while doing this and as a result, review your product poorly, what would you do?
You should reach out to them. Try to understand what their problem is. If you’re not able to resolve it, use software tools like online screen-sharing to allow your customer to show you what the problem is and where it lies. You can then guide them to a solution virtually, without needing to be with them. There are many screen-sharing and control tools available today that allow you to do this:  Acquire, TeamViewer, Skype, and more.
2. Take the issue offline and reach out to them personally.
As discussed earlier, one of the best ways to deal with poor customer reviews and angry customers is to deal with them personally. When you do, be sure to follow these steps to repair the damage:
- Restate the problem to try to better understand exactly what the issue is.
- Ask for clarification if there is even the slightest question about the issue.
- Personalise your response. Do not use generic responses.
- Be polite and use a kind tone.
- If you’re at fault, apologise and acknowledge the customer’s pain and frustration.
- Always start with the good news.
- Satisfy the customer by offering something of value in return.
3. Request removal of the defamatory review.
This may not be easy, but when communicating with your customers, it’s worth asking them to take down the defamatory review. This is generally only plausible once the customer’s issues have been resolved.
4. Monitor your online presence and start taking reviews more seriously.
Given the advancements in data science, it is important to use the information received wisely. To better respond to reviews you need to know what they are!  Online reputation monitoring tools, such as Social Mention, Reputology, and ReviewTrackers, allow you to track your online presence.
More so, setting up Google Alerts for your business name or website will allow you to receive alerts via email whenever your name pops up on the internet. Pretty cool, huh? Other social media management tools, such as Hootsuite, SocialPilot, and Sprout Social, also have extremely effective monitoring capabilities for one’s internet and social media presence.
5. Encourage and ask for customer reviews. Â
The best way to offset the impact of a bad review is by encouraging other customers to provide positive reviews, but do not attempt to influence your customers by forcing them to write reviews. Websites like Yelp discourage this kind of business behaviour and it will backfire on you.
Hang signs and stickers for your businesses. Send out mailings to your customers requesting feedback and reviews. Add notes to your invoices and receipts asking customers to review your products. Place badges on your website linking to your review pages. Reward your customers for their reviews. There are many subtle ways to encourage your customers to review your products – you simply need to take the first step!
Conclusion
There are many ways to deal with customer reviews that won’t work best for your business. You need to make sure that you and your customer support executives know how to deal with them. There are many ways to respond to and minimize the effect of poor customer reviews, like sharing reviews with employees and showing transparency with your customers when mistakes are made. You’re now capable of tackling your customer reviews.
- Top 7 Innovations in Online Customer Experience - April 18, 2019
- Dealing with Poor Customer Reviews – Sam Makad - July 11, 2018
