7 Ways to Handle Negative Reviews With Grace
The face of customer service has completely changed since the pandemic.
As much as the era of COVID-19 feels like a thing of the past in 2024, we still find ourselves dealing with the aftermath of all the changes that it brought.
Customers walk into your stores and buy from your business with new expectations, but there’s one thing that remains the same – the importance of reviews.
The Art of Handling Negative Feedback
In 2024, getting online reviews is inevitable, and at some point you are bound to get a negative one.
Part of it is human nature, part of it is simply because they want to decide if your weaknesses will impact them and the purchase they want to make.
This is why it’s important to always keep an eye out on your reviews and have a strategy in place for how you will respond.
Need ideas? Let’s start with the first thing you should do when you get a negative review.
#1 Do. Your. Research.
Before even thinking about what to respond, make sure to retrace your steps.
Look up the customer, verify who was working that day, and try to understand the situation.
Negative reviews can be an educational opportunity for all parties.
💡PRO TIP: Doing your research can also help you avoid fake reviews. At times you will have people with the wrong intentions leaving a review for your business.
Remember that it is the reviewer’s right to leave a review even if they didn’t make a purchase from you, if they interacted with your business in any way, that’s considered fair game.
#2 Answer Promptly
Now that you have a better idea of the situation, you can think about your response.
It’s important to take your time, but try to answer swiftly. Taking your time is for you to take the emotion out of responding to the review.
Remember to not take it personally and to put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
Yes… we know, easier said than done. But let’s take a step back, and look at the situation.
The sentiment is best shared in this statement:
“Negative reviews are a cry for attention. If your customers are leaving two or three messages, and you're not getting back to them, the fourth message will be a negative review on Google."
This is why automating a text request post-purchase is a foolproof way for you to always connect with customers and give them the opportunity to say what they need to say.
Sometimes it’s not even a horrible experience where they feel compelled to leave a review, sometimes their concern might be too minor to mention in a review but significant enough where it might lead them to not come back to your store.
#3 Create a Formula
Take a page out of Apple’s books (who took a page out of Ritz Carlton’s books) by using their simple 3 A’s formula.
What are Apple’s essential 3 A’s?
Acknowledge - bring validity to their concern.
Align - empathize with their concern.
Assure - let them know that you plan on remedying the situation.
Having a formula gives your team consistency but also ensures that they don’t sound too robotic.
This can even be used with upset customers that walk into your store. Here’s what a response to a review can look like using this strategy.
Have you ever received a review like this one? Here’s how you can respond using the 3 A’s.
“Hi Brian,
We're genuinely sorry for the inconvenience you experienced with our bike repair service. Your feedback is crucial to us. We understand the frustration of a delayed repair and unmet needs.
We want to make things right. We've reached out via text message to discuss your experience and find a solution together.
We strive to improve everyday, and we appreciate your patience. We look forward to your reply.
Ride safe”
💡PRO TIP: Avoid Templates
Having your team copy and paste the same response to every negative or positive review can feel very transactional.
You might actually end up upsetting customers that have left a negative review and it is visually obvious to future customers.
It can give the impression that responding to reviews is an un-serious task that your team needs to check off their to-do list rather than an opportunity to learn, grow or reset expectations.
#4 Always Offer a Solution
Even though you might not agree with the situation at hand, it’s important to take ownership of the negative review.
Offering a solution can be as small as offering to have a conversation about the situation.
It is however important to offer some type of next steps, answering a negative review just for the sake of it is not the way to go (exceptions apply).
💡PRO TIP: Repair the relationship, not the review 🙂
Approaching the review with the intent to repair the relationship rather than coming from a place of annoyance will make all the difference in your response.
#5 Take It Offline
Replying to a negative review directly on the review website is not only an act of attempting to rectify the situation but it is also important for the ‘publicity’.
You want future customers to see that you care about their experience and that you take ownership of your customer’s concern.
Once that initial public reply is posted, include next steps on taking it offline. Better yet, if you’ve done step 1 (Do Your Research), and you were able to find the customer, send them a text message or email letting them know you’d like to make things right.
How to respond to a negative review and take the conversation offline:
“Thank you for your kind words about our jewelry and your valuable feedback regarding the wait time. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused. We've looked into your experience and have already sent you a text message to discuss this further. Please understand that sometimes, the store traffic can be unpredictable, but we're committed to improving our services.”
#6 Transform Complaints Into Praise
Once you have rectified the situation, you can ask the customer to update their review to reflect the next steps that you took.
This might lead the customer to remove their review all together or update their review.
More often than not, customers will keep their review but choose to update it.
With Google Reviews, It’s important to ask them to specifically update the star rating so that it does not affect your overall rating.
With Facebook Reviews, customers will have to update their ‘Not Recommend’ to a ‘Recommend’, which is a more obvious change once you resolve the situation.
An updated review can actually look good for your business, a reasonable person knows that we all have off days and that some people might have completely different reactions to some situations.
An updated review doesn’t attempt to hide the truth, rather it shows to other customers that you take ownership of situations and you repair them.
#7 Apologize… but Not for Everything
We are taking a page out of Google’s books for this advice since you cannot make everyone happy.
You might get customers that are unhappy with your return policy or maybe there were service interruptions because of an internet outage during their visit.
Feel free to educate them on what happened and alleviate the need to apologize for things that are out of your control.
Multi-Location Business? You Need a Review Response Policy
Having a review policy simply means you have the same approach for responding to reviews in every location.
Although your stores can be under different management, it is important for your brand to have the same tone and experience in every location.
Having consistency in experience will build more trust and confidence when potential customers are researching and preparing for their next visit.
An important tool for multi-location businesses that can help with experience consistency is Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Combining NPS with reviews is a way for your business to have control of what happens in your stores.
At the end of the day, anyone can leave a review for your business, but if you are actively taking a health check on every customer that purchases from you with NPS text requests, then you are already one step ahead and know exactly the experience that your teams are providing at every location.
The beauty of NPS text requests is that it is quick and easy, and the best part is that it gives you the opportunity to solve any issues or misconceptions in a private conversation.
What About the Positive and Neutral Reviews?
Should you reply to all positive reviews?
In this case we agree with Google’s advice on responding to a few but not all.
Especially if you implement review requests via text message, you will start to receive more reviews than normal (check out Dash Bicycle’s success story here) and your resources might not be able to handle answering every single review.
Should you reply to all neutral reviews?
We recommend replying to all neutral reviews with a neutral response.
It’s important to address any concern that the customer has brought up, but there’s no need to assume negative intent.
Neutral reviews can be defined either in their actual reviews, in the star rating, or if a customer chooses to not recommend your business even though they had a positive experience.
Here’s what that can look like:
“Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. We're sorry to hear that your experience was just average. We have sent you a text as we’d love to hear from you about how we can improve our product variety. As for the layout, we aim to ensure all pet parents have a consistent experience. We hope to provide a more satisfying experience in the future.”
Educate Yourself & Educate Them
What does educating yourself look like?
First we recommend that you take all the necessary steps in setting up your Google Business Profile and you have the right notifications turned on.
Second, educating yourself is all about truly understanding how review websites work. We have a few posts about Google reviews and check out this post on Facebook reviews because it does work quite differently than Google reviews.
This will help you with the on-going strategy that you will implement for responding to reviews.
Educating your customers is all about providing value and information every step of the way.
Waiting to educate your customer after they’ve left a negative review is not ideal, but if you have to, remember to follow the steps in this post and that it’s all about resetting expectations.