For every business owner, a bad review can cause anxiety and stress. However, even a negative review can yield a positive outcome if it’s approached the right way. 

How Bad Reviews Can Be Good For Busines

Relatability 

A review that’s antagonistic or even hostile can be particularly unpleasant to receive. The good news is, it just might make your brand more relatable. After all, every one of your customers will have at some point been treated unfairly too and they’re likely to identify someone who’s being unreasonable.

The key in these situations is to respond to the review in a manner that’s calm, professional and sincere. 

Authenticity

You’re bound to encounter someone having a bad day eventually and savvy consumers understand that. In fact, having exclusively positive reviews can actually trigger scepticism about a brand. 

You may have encountered this effect yourself if you’ve ever run into a brand whose reviews seemed oddly worded, conveniently packed with SEO keywords or gave the distinct impression that they’d been left by a friend of the owner rather than a true customer.

Experienced consumers know that some disreputable companies compensate for poor quality by amassing tons of fake five star reviews. By contrast, having a mix of reviews can signal that your company is receiving authentic engagement from the community. 

Insight

Customers who take the time to give you negative feedback might just be offering you some of your most valuable market research.  It may be the case that many of your customers are encountering a particular problem and simply not returning to do business with you without telling you why. 

Sometimes a negative review will illuminate opportunities to optimize some feature or process of your business.  Be especially mindful of recurring complaints.

Conversion

A negative review offers you the opportunity to convert a negative customer experience into a positive one. 

If you feel you’ve received a valid complaint: 

• Show appreciation for the customer’s honest feedback. 
• Validate the customer’s concern. 
• Consider offering some kind of compensation. 

A customer who takes the time to complain is offering you the chance to change their mind. Why not take them up on the offer? 

Demonstration of Values

Each time you respond to a review, you’re not just communicating with the person who left the review, you’re also communicating to any prospective customer who might read those reviews. 

Potential customers pay particular attention to how you respond to negative feedback. This means each negative review is an opportunity to demonstrate your values to prospective clients.  A respectful and thoughtful response to a negative review can earn you credibility with those who have yet to engage with your business.

How to Manage Your Reviews

The best way to reduce stress around negative reviews is to develop a simple and complete plan around monitoring and responding to all of your reviews. 

Monitoring & Tracking

• Identify Platforms: Determine where your customers are likely to leave reviews. (e.g., Google, Yelp, Facebook, industry-specific sites).
• Check Regularly: Check reviews on a regular schedule and respond to each of them. Even a brief response makes a big difference. Assign this task to a specific person so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. 
• Use Tools: Consider using online reputation management tools to track reviews across multiple platforms, analyze trends, and manage responses.

Nine planets offers reputation management through our local search tracking plan to help you monitor your reviews from Google, Facebook, Yelp and more.

Responding to Reviews

• Respond to All Reviews: Respond to both positive and negative reviews quickly to show that you value customer feedback.
• Personalize Your Responses: Tailor your responses to each review to demonstrate that you’ve read and understood the customer’s feedback.
• Acknowledge Positive Reviews: Thanking customers for their positive feedback will reinforce their positive experience.
• Address Negative Reviews Professionally: Acknowledge the concerns, address any changes that may be adopted to prevent this issue from recurring and offer some form of compensation or discount if warranted. 
• Take Issues Offline: If necessary, offer to discuss sensitive issues privately. 
• Stay Professional: Keep in mind that private emails can be made public after the fact. Treat any private correspondence with a customer as though it might one day become public. 
• Get Help: Writing a thoughtful response to a negative review can be tricky. The best response sometimes requires more than one draft and more than one author.
  • Collaborate: Ask another team member to review your response before you send it or to draft a response that you can review.
  • Outsource: If you receive a high volume of reviews, consider having a third-party company to help you both craft your responses and ensure that every review receives a response.
    A good company will take the time to understand your business’s values and tone-of-voice before they start responding to reviews. They should also demonstrate good communication and be willing to reach out to you if they encounter any issues. 

Analyzing & Improving

• Identify Trends: Use review management tools to identify trends and recurring issues.
• Adapt and Improve: Once you’ve identified recurring issues that customers face, take the opportunity to brainstorm with your team on how you can reduce these issues going forward. 
• Use AI-Powered Tools Responsibly: An authentic response from a real person at your business is always the best route. However, if you’re struggling to find the right wording or strike the right tone in your response, using an AI tool might help.
  Just remember, AI isn’t guaranteed to deliver an optimal result. We recommend using AI to generate a first draft and refine it from there or have a team member review the response before you post it. 

Offer Alternatives to Public Reviews

When a person leaves a negative review, it can feel as though they’ve set out to harm your business. It’s important to remember that this is often not the case. In fact, many customers would prefer to offer private feedback if given the opportunity. 

Soliciting Private Feedback

Customers often just want to be heard. Consider offering one of the following forums for private feedback. 

• Suggestion Box: if you’ve got a brick and mortar location, this can be a good option. Make sure it’s located in an area that’s easy to access but doesn’t require the customer to have direct social interaction with staff if they’d prefer not to. You want that feedback. Make sure that giving it is comfortable for your customers. 
• “How’d We Do?”: Add a question to the end of the sales process that allows customers to rate their experience and give feedback. 
• Follow-up Emails: Have automated emails that go out a few minutes after a customer has completed their purchase. Ask them to rate their experience and include a place for them to write feedback. 

If you’re going to solicit private feedback, make sure your process includes an automatic message thanking the customer for taking the time to give you feedback and be sure to write a separate response to address any negative feedback. 

Encourage Good Reviews

• Ask for reviews: Don’t be afraid to proactively ask satisfied customers to leave reviews. In fact, it’s advisable to make asking for a review part of your sales process. The key is to select the right moment in the process to ask for a review. 

For example: if you’re a dentist, asking for a review immediately after a client’s treatment might not be the best timing. In this case, it might be better to wait until the client has fully recovered from the procedure. Asking for a review two weeks after the appointment might be better. 

• Make it easy: Make reviewing your company as easy as possible. Create a poster with a QR code that links to your review page and write out brief but clear instructions on how to leave a review. Keep your review poster in a location that’s easy for customers to see and use. 
• Encourage customers to mention a service or location: Having a specific service or location mentioned on customer reviews is a simple but strong way to boost your local SEO, and you can achieve that by simply asking them when sending the review invitation.
• Follow-up Emails: Follow up emails aren’t just an opportunity to discreetly gather and respond to negative feedback. They’re also a great way to remind customers to give you a positive review if they enjoyed your service. 

We recommend limiting yourself to one or two follow-up emails. 

Make The Best of Bad Reviews

Don’t let bad reviews throw you off your game. They may be doing you more good than you know. 

• Have a Plan:
  • Develop a simple plan for monitoring, responding and managing your reviews. 
  • Make asking for a review a regular part of your business.
• Keep Your Cool:
  • Remember that some customers have the best of intentions, even when leaving a bad review.
  • You can manage the perception others have of an unfair review by responding in a way that’s assertive and appropriate.
• Show Your Values: Take every negative review as an opportunity to show your values and demonstrate professionalism.