What to do with negative reviews online
Your business can be greatly impacted by negative reviews online. There is a saying that the negative comments are the ones that get passed on more frequently than positive comments and can have a more significant impact on your business than positive ones have. Handling the negative reviews and comments is an essential and critical part of managing your business reputation online.
Some websites will allow you to pay to remove negative reviews and to promote positive reviews. While this is an option in dire situations it can also impact customer opinion as they may be annoyed if they see you taking this step in a way that they believe will minimize their free speech. Further, unless you remedy the problems that your business has with its customer base you aren’t impacting the root of the problem and the negative reviews will ultimately come back in one form or another.
When your business receives negative comments on the internet it is important that your business responds in the right way so that customers are positively impacted by your professionalism. Often this is through seeking to understand the problem, acknowledging the issues that the customer had, and being level headed in response to the problems that they have identified. Do not lash out at the reviewer and provide them with a resource to contact you to discuss the issue further. This attention more than anything else is what the customer is often looking for when they are making their complaint. Do not feel as if you have to remedy every complaint or problem, but be willing to listen to them and be level and fair when trying to understand what went wrong with the transaction.
You cannot appease every customer and every review need not be positive. Just be appropriate with responding to them and remember that acting out against your customers can not only lead to alienate them but also to negatively impact other potential customers. Negative comments can stay on the internet for a long time and perhaps forever so you simply do not want to create an outburst that negatively leads to problems online.