Every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare is negative reviews about their offerings. However, no business is perfect even though you try your best. There are occurrences when you would not be able to deliver your brand promise, resulting in bad reviews. There’s also the possibility of unreasonable customers.
However, the first thing you need to do is to calm down and prevent yourself from panicking. It can help if you have the presence of mind and smart assessment to successfully deal with these problems.
What Can You Do About Negative Reviews
Instead of crying or giving up instantly, here are the critical things you need to do:
- Look up all the negative comments you can find. Try searching for your business, company name, product, or service name on Google, and see what people say about them. While doing so, take note of which among these opinions rank higher than others.
- Deal with topmost comments first. These reviews mean that your potential customers might see them first as well.
- Aside from Google, try to look up your business and name in other popular review sites, such as Google My Business, social media, Insider Pages, Angie’s List, Yelp, and more.
- When reading the negative comments, try to look for the commonalities between their complaints. Try to figure out which are genuine concerns and which ones are fake.
- Finally, decide on how you want to deal with or eliminate the problem.
How to Deal With Negative Business Reviews
Here are some of the most common ways you can do to your negative business reviews:
1 – Fix the Problem.
The best way to deal with your problems is to fix them. Which of the complaints are valid and recurring? You need to ensure you do not repeat the same mistakes. The more you avoid the reality, the more customers might end up complaining about the same thing. The more complaints you receive, the more they would appear in your business’s review section.
2 – Delete These Negative Comments.
This advice may be easier said than done. Deleting hateful comments might require you to message each review site and request them to take down the nasty comments your business has received. Unfortunately, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not make the websites responsible for their users’ posts. Therefore, they will get nothing from doing you a favor.
The case of review sites is different. Since reviews are their focus, they have stricter guidelines about review removals. You need to have solid proof that the accusations are invalid or fake.
To ensure that your attempt is successful, make sure that you study each review site carefully and follow its rules. Strategize according to the rules they set. For example, in Angie’s List, they only remove comments when the commenter asks for its removal. If that is the case, you can approach the reviewer and discuss it with them first.
3 – Respond to Them.
Instead of avoiding or hiding criticism, another method you can do is respond. However, you need to ensure that your page remains professional and polite throughout. If your business is at fault, do not forget to apologize, admit your mistake, and offer a solution. When potential customers see how well you handle these problems, you could earn their trust.
Conclusion
Reviews of all kinds are essential to businesses. Even as an entrepreneur, you look up reviews before you decide to purchase anything. While you can try to get as many positive reviews as you can, be ready for any negative reviews that come your way. Instead of seeing them as problems, you can also view them as ways you can improve. Make sure that you do not ignore them as they could hurt the business’s reputation. Study them carefully and come up with the best way to turn the situation around.
If you need help in customer review management, we can do it for you. GHAX Digital Marketing offers a review management service to ensure your business’s reputation is protected. We can even help you get great reviews from customers on autopilot. Contact us today at (585) 440-3113 to learn more about the service.
