The Wrong Way to Deal With Bad Reviews And How To Turn Them Into Good Ones

Have you gotten a bad review and you’re not sure what to do about it? Bad reviews are stressful and if it’s the first one you’ve had it can be scary. If you respond the wrong way you’re just going to taint your reputation even more and less people will want to buy from you. However, the right way to respond can even turn the person that left you a bad review into one of your best ambassadors. We’re going to show you the wrong way to deal with negative reviews and then explain what the right way would look like so you can turn them into happy customers and keep your reputation in good standing.

The very first error you might make is to not respond at all. This makes your business look either not on top of things, or even worse, one that doesn’t know how to take feedback. Not responding to reviews (both positive and negative) is like having a storefront with the sign not on, it’s not going to invite any customers in. So just make sure you respond, and don’t throw out an automated response, that’s essentially the same as not responding.

The second thing you should never do when responding to a bad review is to fight with them. This gets you nowhere and is just going to make them more angry and makes you look like the one in the wrong. Instead you want to respond in a way that defuses the situation and brings the discussion into a private conversation where they can tell you everything that went wrong for them without it having to be posted for anyone to see.

With the discussion now in private it’s super important to not fight in there either. This is a really easy situation to turn into a battle of egos but the very first thing to do when it goes into a private channel is to just defuse the situation. It’s ok to apologize, you might be completely in the right, but it doesn’t matter. If they’re angry they won’t listen to you no matter how right you may be. So figure out why they’re so hurt, what went wrong, and what you can do to fix it.

Having the right information in hand and the situation diffused, now you can start to turn things into your favor. Take advantage of it, you know why they’re upset, and how to fix it. So fix it. Make things more than right. Go overboard but in the right place. If they felt like they didn’t get enough, give back double what they felt they should’ve had. Making things right is much harder than making a customer upset but the payoff of making things right is massive. So make it more than right.

So there you go, you have successfully turned an unhappy customer into a happy one. But that’s not what this article is about, you came in trying to figure out what to do with bad reviews. Well there is one final step that as simple as it is, completely changes the outcome of your work. That is simply asking for them to change the review. Verify with them that they don’t feel the same way they did about you when they left the review and if that’s the case ask if they’re willing to change the review. Some of your best reviews can come directly from doing that.

That’s how you handle bad reviews and turn them into good ones. To recap, when you get a bad review respond as quickly as possible and move the conversation into private. In private, defuse the situation and get to the root of their feelings. Once you know how to make them happy again, act on it, make things right. Finally once the customer is happy, ask them to update their review to reflect their current situation.

That’s it! A great thing this process also gives you is a great way to improve your quality. You are forced to make things right for each unhappy customer, so overtime you’ll get way less unhappy customers.

Now if having plans like this one that tell you how to handle each situation of your business is something that you see as useful but maybe you don’t have the time or energy to do it yourself, bring us in to grow your business. We’re going to do a full analysis of your business to determine what you need, then we’re going to make a full plan based on that analysis, and finally we’re going to that plan to work for you. That way your business grows so you can work less and make more money. No need to be stuck wondering what to do at each new turn your business takes.

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