No matter how competently nor carefully you conduct business, mistakes can happen, oversight will occur, and people will write negative reviews. In the days before the internet, reviews spread by word of mouth might have had less of an effect on your brand reputation, but these days they are posted online, publicly, for all to see.
Knowing how to respond to negative reviews—wherever they are published—is critical to the continued success of your business. Not only can a prompt professional response mitigate potential damage to your reputation, but a well-worded reply can also make a negative review work in your favour.
This point is best illustrated by the fact that customers will read an average of 10 online reviews before feeling like they can trust the products or services of a business, whilst 89% of all customers report reading the replies which businesses write.
Replying to negative feedback can be both daunting and difficult to emotionally detach from, but learning how to do so can help you turn those negatives into tangible positives for your business and brand. Read on to discover 10 expert tips from the ‘busy bees’ at WebHummel for how to reply to negative reviews, and take the stress out of the situation.
Where to look for customer reviews: negative, neutral, or positive
There are a whole host of digital platforms on which customers may choose to leave you feedback, from social media to reviews sites and beyond. In order to reply to negative reviews, you’ll first need to know where to find them.
- On your public Google Business Profile
- On reviews and consumer advice websites like Trustpilot, Tripadvisor, and Yelp
- In @mentions on social media (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, TikTok)
- In the comments sections of your social media posts
- In private direct messages on social media
- In emails or comments via your website’s Contact Page
Why reply to negative reviews?
Negative reviews can range from the constructive and compassionate to the unexpectedly ugly. Some may feel unnecessarily harsh or even like a personal attack on you or your staff. You may well be left wondering, does every review really need a reply? As unpleasant as it can be to read these reviews, the answer remains a resounding ‘yes!’
The damage which unresolved negative reviews can do to your business is never worth the time or energy you might save in refusing to respond. Moreover, the potential benefits of responding—yes, you read that correctly!—can help you to transform negativity into positive growth.
The potential risks of leaving negative reviews alone
- A damaged brand reputation: Not replying to negative reviews can quickly damage your business’s reputation. The digital silence makes it look—both to the complainant and other prospective customers—as though you don’t care.
- The loss of current and prospective customers: Many customers, particularly those online, rely heavily on the reviews of others before deciding whether or not to engage with your offering. Negative reviews left unresolved can ward off untold numbers of current and potential future customers.
- A lower SERPs ranking: Google and other search engine hosts like it will often factor your customer rating into the equation when determining where to place your link on SERPs (Search Engine Page Results). SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the technique used to improve this standing, and push your business toward the top of the search page. Unfortunately, no amount of SEO can neutralise those negative reviews—only a well-crafted response can do that.
The benefits of responding to negative reviews
- Responses limit the damage done to your brand: This is the most obvious of the benefits associated with responding to negative reviews, but it is also one of the most important. By carefully replying to each and every negative review you receive, you can effectively nip the potential damage they would otherwise have cause you in the bud.
- Responses show you care: Replying to negative reviews calmly and consistently demonstrates to every customer which reads your response(s) that you actually care about the quality of their experience, or journey. The more you can demonstrate the importance of your customers to your business, the more likely they are to engage with you and stick around for the long haul.
- Negative reviews can provide useful feedback and opportunities for growth: The majority of negative reviews are not unfounded, but rather have been prompted by a genuine mistake made, or fault found within your offering. Through interaction with the disgruntled customer, you can often identify areas for improvement within your business, thus converting a negative into a positive opportunity for growth.
- A healthy review environment can help boost sales: By encouraging a more positive, mutually beneficial dialogue—through reviews—between you and your customers, you can foster trust in your business and in doing so increase the conversion-worthy traffic from review sites to yours.
- An active review environment can also boost local SEO: Local SEO—aimed at customers in your area—can be improved through the accrual of positive customer reviews, whilst the reviews themselves can also, in return, improve your SEO. Responding to negative reviews may also help boost SEO for your local business.
How to reply to negative reviews from customers: 10 best practices
Whether you’re here because you want to know how to respond to negative Google reviews, because you want to improve customer interaction on Instagram, or any combination in-between, the following 10 best practices have been tried and tested to help you reap the benefits of replying to negative feedback.
1) Always remain professional
Regardless of how personal or unsolicited a review may feel, aggravated and unprofessional responses will only further damage your business’s reputation. We recommend taking a step back from the keyboard whenever you receive a negative review. Take a moment to calmly collect your thoughts, and then begin drafting your review—using professional language—once you feel you are emotionally disconnected from it.
2) Always respond, and do so in a timely manner
Every review deserves a response. Even the least-sensical, most outlandish of negative reviews. Equally as important is the timeframe in which you choose to respond. The longer you leave a review unacknowledged, the more time it has to snowball—with potential further comments from the original complainant, interaction from other potential customers, and more airtime for the negative review. You should aim to respond to all negative reviews within 24 hours or less.
3) Acknowledge and respect the customer’s experience
One of the focuses of your response should be on the customer’s experience, however you feel about it. Your reply should make the customer feel seen, heard, and respected, which means isolating the issues highlighted by the reviewer and openly acknowledging them directly.
4) Apologise!
One of the most important things for a customer to hear, following their complaint, is that you acknowledge the part you played in delivering an inadequate customer experience, and are genuinely sorry for this.
Depending on the trickiness of the situation, you may not want to admit culpability, but you don’t have to in order to make a customer feel seen and heard. Acknowledging that they are unhappy and that this is not what you want for your customers is a solid foundation for an apology.
We would, however, recommend that you keep the apology part of your reply short and to the point. Overly effusive apologies can sound disingenuous and may ultimately place more blame on your brand than necessary.
5) Personalise your review
Stock reviews will be spotted by your customers from a mile off. Most customers will leave a review from their own personal profile—be that via a social media handle or Google Reviews account.
When responding to a negative Google review, for example, be sure to personalise it by addressing the reviewer by name. You can further personalise the response—thus making it feel more caring and genuine—by introducing yourself and your position within the company.
6) Thank the reviewer for their feedback
As important as apologising for the negative experience each reviewer has had, is thanking them for their feedback. Doing so demonstrated to anyone who reads your response that you are not only sorry for the inconvenience, but both welcome feedback and are actively engaged in using it to minimise the chances of the issue in question occurring again.
7) Offer a solution
Responding to negative reviews also offers you a direct opportunity to make up for the inconvenience(s) caused. Depending on the issues raised by the review, you should try to determine how best to redress them.
For example, if someone has purchased a product of yours which they’ve found to be faulty, you could offer them a refund and/or replacement. If a service of yours was deemed unsatisfactory, on the other hand, you could offer the reviewer a discount on the same or other services.
Beware, though, it is important not to come across as too ‘salesy’ here. You must remember that whatever you offer won’t undo the customer’s bad experience, and so offering a solution is a means to try and repair the relationship, not buy their silence.
8) Take communication with the negative reviewer offline ASAP
The more involved the discussion around negative online reviews becomes, the larger the ‘thread’ (or chain of comments and replies), and the more visible the original negativity is for other customers to see.
In your original reply to the reviewer, it is worthwhile asking them to contact you directly and—most crucially—privately. You can ask them, for example, to email or phone you to discuss the matter in greater detail.
This suggestion not only shows that you care, but also closes the public side of the discussion as quickly as possible.
9) Establish a reviews response team
On a more general note, a good way to streamline your response time, whilst ensuring each reply adheres to a consistent high quality, is to delegate responsibility for customer engagement to a single person or team.
Responding to reviews and customer comments is, in effect, part of the online digital marketing strategy process, so you could incorporate this task into the daily routines of your digital marketing team.
For multinationals with teams and customers spread across international markets, the creation of a dedicated customer engagement team can help keep response quality uniform.
10) Create a policy for responding to reviews
In a similar vein, WebHummel’s final tip for how to reply to negative reviews is to do with company policy. Most businesses will have a policy covering employment, onboarding, and equality, diversity and inclusion, among other things. Adding to this a policy for customer engagement—ostensibly outlining exactly how to go about responding to reviews—helps to ensure that your replies stay on-brand no matter who posts them.
What about positive and neutral reviews?
Replying to negative reviews is important, but what about those more ambiguous reviews, or the ones with nothing but praise? Yes, those deserve a reply, too. With a neutral review containing both praise and complaints, you can follow the same steps outlined above, remembering to reinforce the positives mentioned at the same time. For purely positive reviews, a simple, enthusiastic ‘thank you’ will suffice.
How to reply to negative reviews from employees
Just as customers can leave negative reviews which might affect your chances with other customers, employees can also review your business online. Recruitment and job advertisement platforms like Glassdoor and Indeed offer past and present employees the opportunity to share their experiences working with your company.
A disgruntled former employee’s negative review may put prospective talent off applying to work for you, negatively affecting both your reputation and ability to conduct business in the long run.
In addition to the tips offered above, we suggest adapting your review response with some additional suggestions:
- Ask for further feedback: The more insight into the issue(s) you can acquire, the more capable you will be to address them.
- Take demonstrable action to correct the issue: Speaking of addressing the issues, it is important that you take action to resolve problems mentioned in negative employee reviews, and highlight this in your response. Doing so may help curb any further negative comments from the same employee, as well as prevent other employees experiencing the same issue in future.
- Open the floor to current employee feedback on the issue: If you want to go the extra mile—especially if you’ve accrued the same negative feedback from several employee reviews—you could opt to open the floor to feedback on the topic from your current team.
Optimise your company’s relationship with employees and customers using WebHummel
The online marketplace can be an overwhelming place to conduct business. Almost every part of the customer journey tends now to take place online, from customer acquisition and lead generation through SEO, and customer retention with elements like quality web design, to engaging with customer feedback—positive, neutral, and negative.
If your business lacks the resources to optimally cover every aspect of the online customer experience, then we’d recommend outsourcing at least some part of your digital operations to beefound.agency. With years of expertise in delivering bespoke digital marketing services to our clients, we can help you ‘bee’ found online—and once there, ensure that your customers feedback never goes unnoticed or underappreciated.
Take the stress out of customer engagement, get in touch today.
