Negative Reviews and Here’s How to Handle Them

Negative reviews are some of the daredevils of brands. Nobody wants a negative review that has the potential of denting the image of their business. In fact, nobody wants a bad review at all. However, the truth is every business will get negative reviews and here’s how how to handle them.

In your journey as an online entrepreneur, negative reviews are part of the online business environment, and you have to get used to them. A mishandled negative review could destroy the image that has taken your company years to build. However, negative reviews have been known to even increase the fortunes of a company. Yeah, you read that right. Negative reviews have the potential for making your business scale a good height like good publicity will do for you when you know how to handle them. It is in this way therefore that negative reviews can be seen as a double-edged sword that could either hack the integrity of a company down or spike up the positive public appearance of a company.

It is, therefore, necessary to master the art of handle negative reviews so that imminent doom is not spelled for your organization or company. Here are the necessary ways on how to handle negative reviews:

Learn from negative reviews

It is true negative reviews scares any business owner. However, do not fret into not learning from the experience negative reviews may offer your business regarding growth. Whenever you get negative reviews, do not let your offense instinct kick in. I know it is quite hard to remain cool and sane when you are dealt with negative reviews for a product you have given all your efforts to. It is hard to remain calm, but you should indeed keep your cool, as taking a rash decision could be harmful than the ill inherent in the negative reviews. So when you receive a couple of negative reviews, what should do? The first thing to at that very instance is to see what you could learn from it. No matter how bad negative reviews are, there are always things to learn from them. So gather all the negative reviews and give them a close study altogether. Honest, creative reviews would always have a common complaint running through them. These shared common complaints will be your reference point for learning. No one, no matter how good and creative, is beyond improvements. These negative reviews, after all, may be your catalyst for new growth.

Do research

Where many business owners get it wrong is that they are always in a rush to give a quick response to a negative review so they can save face and keep their brand’s integrity intact. This is where many brands fall prey to the negative reviews. You do not rush into responding to a negative review that already has the main purpose of harming your brand. Rather this is what you should do; do research on the following:

The transaction history of the customer,
How the said customer with the negative review received their delivery,
How their delivery was packaged, the location of the customer,
How the customer made their purchase (if it was through your online outlet, or through your physical outlet),
How long the customer has been patronizing your company,
Know if this customer has ever given you a positive review before then,
If the negative review is the first the negative review.
If the customer has ever benefitted from any giveaway program from your brand.

Respond

Now that you have researched well on the customer(s) with the negative review, your response will benefit greatly from the research. Never let a negative review slide without responding to it. Doing so could gravely harm your company. Respond to your negative reviews with such calmness that would portray your company as being sensitive and concerned towards customer’s reviews. That could be a great plus to the brand. Remember, there will always be problems and bad reviews, but make sure you are judged well on how you respond to them.

Act

What is the sense in learning from a negative review if you are not going to act accordingly? Now it is time to perform all the necessary redress to fix the issues raised by the negative reviews. If the customer complaint was in a public forum (like on Amazon or eBay), make sure you address that customer publicly so to calm fears of potential buyers. If those potential buyers see that you addressed the complaint in a timely and appropriate manner you will be more likely to get that sale, too.

References

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/299062