Posts Tagged ‘Product’

7 Ultimate Ways to Fix a Negative Business Review of Your Brand

June 15th, 2015

Did you know that one negative review can affect your business’ bottom line?

When we talk about online reputation management, business reviews and ratings take the center stage. As brands live and breathe based on their ratings on Yelp and Google, you wouldn’t want anything which can damage your sales. Here are the 7 ultimate ways to fix any negative reviews that can hurt your business reputation.

1. Revise Your Product & Services

The first step for a business that suffers serious online review issues is: Take a look in the mirror. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try to look at things their way – how would you feel and react if you shared their experience dealing with your brand?

Even if you think you’re satisfactory, go an extra mile to make things right. This is an effort you put to ensure future success and a positive reputation.

A single crazy client can tarnish your name online and prejudice other clients to be critical of your company. This can result in your business losing many customers. So, the first step is to address all the issues your customers have.

2. Add Sugar to a Sour Situation

When you get a bad review, try contacting that customer and see if you can make it up to them. Making things right is an excellent opportunity to promote your business, in some cases. Even if it doesn’t turn out as expected, exhibiting a desire to make it up to dissatisfied customers reassures other potential customers that you care about delivering a good experience to them.

3. If You Make Things Right With The Customer, Ask Them To Reconsider The Negative Review

A customer may decide to revise their review or remove it. However, if customers are only unenthusiastically satisfied with your second attempt, or if they like to criticize regardless of you putting your best foot forward to please them, then your best bet is to keep silent and see how it goes.

4. If You Cannot Reverse the Process, Acknowledge It

“Fix it” approach may not always be doable, especially when the service is time-based, or when the product is no longer available.

Even if it is not feasible make it up to a dissatisfied customer for whatever reason, at least try apologizing for his or her bad experience and promise to revise your policies or serve better in the future.

Be polite or at least neutral and decent in your response. This type of expression in a public forum is beneficial because it starts to diffuse your customers’ agony a bit – they at least know their voice has been heard. It tells rest of the people that you care about your customers and value professionalism, which is great when selecting merchants.

As described in point number 2, this could be great for promoting your business.

5. The No-Nonsense Approach

You may be able to make all the unfair reviews disappear. But, unfortunately, it is very common for unhappy ex-employees or vicious competitors to post false reviews about your company.

If you can point out the false review(s), you might be able to make them disappear by getting in touch with the website and requesting intervention.

if you are in a situation where the review is abnormal or a scam, thoroughly read the website policies and if it’s not applicable, contact the site.

6. Temper Down

All companies should expect some negative reviews, but if your overall review portfolio on a website has these in a small percentage compared with positive reviews, then it doesn’t really damage your reputation in most cases. In fact, few negative reviews give your company an authentic identity on a review site.

If your business has very few or no reviews, you should encourage your customers to review you. If you have one or two negative ones, encourage pleased customers to review you to temper down the outliers. Just make sure not to offer customers incentives to post positive reviews.

7. Hire Services That Help You Extract More Reviews

Complaints and negative reviews on Google can harm the potential of any brand. But thankfully, there are many companies out there offering services that help businesses extract reviews from their previous and existing customers. This is particularly beneficial for those businesses that traditionally get fewer online reviews, such as doctors and lawyers. Also, it is crucial to say that there is a myth surrounding the removal of bad reviews (particularly the guaranteed removal of unwanted content). Certain reputation management service providers clarify this misunderstanding through their Guaranteed Removals review.

In some cases, these services allow you to seize a negative review before it goes public, so that you can address the issue with your customer, first.

The Final Word

Don’t ignore the importance of customer service. Pay attention to the lowest reviews as well as the average or mediocre ones. This feedback platform is a valuable source of information for your business, helping you to fine-tune it – until it is world class and makes your customers extremely pleased.

So, even though a negative review can be a real hard blow on your face, take it as a caution light and appreciate how it may be encourage your business operations to improve.