It’s never pleasant receiving negative online reviews but they’re not necessarily a bad thing & can actually be used to your advantage.
It’s never pleasant receiving poor feedback but negative online reviews are not necessarily a bad thing & can actually be used to your advantage.
In this digital age, online reviews now play a huge role in influencing customer’s buying choices. According to a recent survey by Bright Local a whopping 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation (see full survey results here). With that in mind, I often hear concerns from new businesses about setting up social media accounts or listing their business on directory websites purely because of their fear of possibly receiving negative online reviews.
In my opinion, this is nothing to fear; not only do the benefits of online reviews far outweigh the risks but as strange as it may sound, receiving negative feedback is not necessarily a bad thing.
Negative Online Reviews can actually be used to your advantage for a number of reasons:
People expect a quick response in the online world so you need to deal with this promptly, but at the same time when you are best equipped to do so. Understandably you might feel sad or angry after reading negative online reviews but the worst thing you can do is respond to them when you’re still upset. So go grab a coffee & some chocolate and deal with it after you’ve cooled down and have a clear head.
There’s nothing worse than reading a response to a negative review that is defensive, making excuses, or sometimes even rude; even if you disagree with their comments or if they are being unreasonable you need to be polite, professional and keep your personal thoughts to yourself. You need to try and understand why the customer has posted it and what their pain points are if you hope to have a successful outcome.
If they have a justifiable complaint, take responsibility for it and do what you must to address the situation. Most people understand that sometimes things just don’t go quite to plan, but if you take ownership of it and resolve the situation you’ll earn their respect and they may even change their review as a result. Furthermore, if other current or potential customers see this, it will give them greater confidence in your customer service.
No matter what you do, there will be the odd occasion where someone just cannot be satisfied and may even be unreasonable. In these cases, again address the customer’s complaint and make it known what steps you have taken to resolve the issue. Even if they don’t change/remove their review, most people understand that some people just cannot be pleased, but if you at least demonstrate that you have tried everything to make a difficult customer happy, it’s only going to reflect positively on you.
If things don’t go quite to plan, it might be prudent to take the conversation offline. Provide them with your direct contact details so you can deal with it privately; any continual negative back-and-forth that is public won’t be helpful to anyone.
If the review is intentionally malicious or breaks any rules (swearing, personal attacks, etc.) you can reach out to the site owner and ask for it to be removed. This can be a slow process sometimes or the site owner might disagree with you, so it’s always best to try everything else first and remember to keep your cool.
It’s never pleasant receiving a negative review but you can also turn it into a positive by learning something from it. As a result of the negative feedback you can:
Final note: “How many people are completely successful in every department of life? Not one. The most successful people are the ones who learn from their mistakes and turn their failures into opportunities.” Zig Ziglar
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My name is Libby. I help entrepreneurs create digital marketing strategies that captivate & convert high-value clients.
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