No one likes negative reviews. Whether you are building a personal brand or running a company, negative reviews can hamper your reputation. If you avoid them, they will keep tarnishing your reputation. Hence, you need to respond to them smartly. Here are a few handy tips to turn negative reviews into a positive event for your company.
Why Should You Respond to Negative Reviews?
You should respond to negative reviews because
it will help change customer behavior about your business. It will also show
customers that you care enough to respond to negativity positively. It will
also help you bond with your customers and even start a conversation with a
customer and change their perception of your brand.
How to Respond to a Negative Review?
Ø Control Your Emotions
Everyone knows that negative reviews,
especially baseless ones, can hurt your feelings. So, your first step should be
not to press the panic button and react to the review without thinking about it
first. If you are not calm, stay away from the computer device until you get
calm.
Ø Follow-Up
Once you have calmed yourself down, the next
step is to talk to the customer and ask what went wrong and how you can correct
it. Posting a response online isn't enough. You need to ensure that you follow
up via phone or email with the customer and help them get a perfect solution, be
it a replacement or a refund.
Ø Don't Give a Standard Response
When tackling a negative review, it's essential
that you mention the reviewer's name, apologize, and accept your mistake. Do
not post standard and formal-looking responses that seem fake. Always try to
connect with the review poster and understand their issues. Also, make sure
they never happen again!
Ø Get it Down
When you have solved the issue as per customer
satisfaction, you should request the customer to take down or modify the
negative review. Don't pressurize them, but you need to follow up multiple
times. Again, don't nag. Just request politely. Here are a few tips on motivating customers to write
reviews for you.
Ø Seek More Positive Reviews
If a customer refuses to edit or delete a
negative review, the only choice you have is to ask your happy customers to add
more positive reviews. The positive and new reviews would push the negative and
old reviews towards the bottom. Here's how to get more positive reviews.
Ø Talk to the Review Website
If you want to take down a negative review, you
can talk to the website owners where the review is posted and prove that a
review is baseless as you have solved the customer's issue or problem. They
might take it down afterward. Also, be prepared for the situation in which the
website might refuse as they have a right to do that.
Ø Recognize Fake Reviews
It is also essential for you to learn how to
recognize fake reviews. If you think a review is not based on facts or fake,
you should report it so that proper action can be taken against the reviewer.
Also, highlight why you think a review is fake by responding to it so that
future customers can know it's fake.
by Shruti , BNS Business News
Source:
https://birdeye.com/blog/how-to-respond-to-negative-reviews/