When someone writes a review for your business, you need to respond.
Did you know that most people will read a local business’ reviews before deciding to work with them? You’d think that, if that were true, it’d be easy to get your customers to write reviews for you, but unfortunately, that’s not usually the case.
While, yes, a lot of people will willingly write a review for your business if you ask them to, you have to ask. You can’t expect your customer service to speak for itself or for your good service alone to compel your customers to write a review for you. The sad fact is that most people won’t write one on their own, not because they don’t care or don’t want to support your business; they just don’t think about it.
It’s for this reason that, when someone does take a few minutes out of their day to write a review for your business, you take the time to respond to it. It’s just common courtesy. It’s important to respond to every review, but it’s absolutely critical that you respond to your negative reviews.
When you respond to a negative review the right way, you can tell your side of the story, turn around a negative customer experience, and show the world how committed you are to providing a great experience for your customers. But, you could all too easily get it wrong, and that can make a bad situation worse.
4 Common Mistakes Businesses Make While Responding to Negative Reviews
Mistake #1. Not giving yourself time to cool off.
It’s not easy to get negative feedback about your business, and sometimes, that feedback won’t even be fair from where you’re sitting. In these cases, it’s all too easy to get upset and defensive, and that’s OK. However, it’s critical that you don’t come off as upset and defensive in your reply.
When someone says something about your business that may seem unfair or inaccurate, your first inclination may be to respond right away to set the record straight. But, if you’re feeling at all upset or emotional, giving yourself a few minutes to cool off is a key step toward responding in the most professional possible way.
Mistake #2. Failing to own up to your mistakes.
As I mentioned, not every review you get will seem fair or accurate in your mind, but that doesn’t mean that it’s fake or that it isn’t an accurate representation of what the customer experienced with your business. Perception is reality, and even if what the customer perceived isn’t the reality of the situation, to them, it will be. It’s important to recognize that in your response.
Owning up to your mistakes doesn’t have to mean taking responsibility for things you didn’t do or have no control over, but it does involve taking a long, hard look at the situation and figuring out what you could have done differently to remedy it.
Even if the issue wasn’t your fault, the customer still had a poor experience with your business, and it’s up to you to apologize to them for their experience. It’s not always easy, but when responding to negative reviews, it’s important that you be the bigger person.
Mistake #3. Getting into a public argument online.
If the reviewer got the situation completely wrong, or if you there were extenuating circumstances that the customer needs to know about, it’s completely acceptable to share your side of the story, but that doesn’t mean that you should allow yourself to get into a public back and forth about it online.
Sometimes, people will accept your response and explanation as what happened, but other times, people just want to complain and be heard. It’s those people that may push back and see your explanation as an excuse, and it’s in those circumstances where your best bet is to take the conversation offline.
If a customer is not willing to accept your explanation or attempts to make it right, apologize and invite them to call or email you to discuss the matter further. If you continue talking about it in public, the possibility is too strong that it will end up in an argument that will only make you look petty.
Mistake #4. Not learning from real feedback.
We are all human, and we all make mistakes. It happens. However, it’s what we learn from those mistakes and what we do with what we’ve learned that helps us grow and get better, and the same principles apply to your business.
Some feedback doesn’t require a lot of reflection or evolution. For instance, let’s say you own a restaurant and one of your servers forgot to put in a drink order or accidentally put in the wrong order for the table. This may mean that the server in question needs more training, but these kinds of mistakes can happen to even the most experienced servers, so they may just be the result of a bad day.
However, other types of feedback aren’t so easy to brush off and may be indicative of a much bigger problem that needs to be addressed within your organization. This is the type of feedback that you should really look at and take to heart because listening to it might be critical to the future success of your business and the happiness of your customers.
It’s not enough to accept feedback, though; you also have to make changes based on that feedback. It also helps to explain the changes you’ll be making in your response to the negative review in question.
Responding to reviews is just one small part of online reputation management.
Reviews play a big role in how people see your business online, and responding to reviews is critical for showing your customers how much you value their feedback and getting your side of the story out there. However, responding to reviews is just one small part of online reputation management.
