Turn Your Negative Online Reviews into a Win

Let’s be honest, even when you’re doing your best to deliver top quality services to your customers, there is still a chance of making a mistake at some point. For example, you’re a business owner that’s working around the clock to be the leader in the local market. Chances are, even with your best efforts to please your customers, there possibility of failure exists. The end result is that you could potentially end up having an unhappy customer. What’s worse is that these unhappy customers can leave you negative reviews on review sites or social media channels despite your best efforts.

Having a proactive approach, you can turn these negative reviews into a positive story for your business. In fact, these are the stories which your customers will always remember.

Here’s Ranked Brain’s step-by-step on how you can minimize the damage that negative reviews could cause to your business.

1. Acknowledgment and timely reach engagement
2. Request for a second chance from the reviewer and amaze them
3. Take feedback and share with the world

Step 1: Acknowledgement and timely engagement

The first thing you should need to do after receiving a negative review is acknowledge them through your official business account. Respond to the negative review with a professional and polite message expressing your sincerest apologies regarding the situation. Go ahead and ask the reviewer to share their contact details. After that, you need to personally follow-up in order to understand what went wrong. Once the customer details are shared, make it a priority to call them up as soon as possible.

Step 2: Request a second chance and amaze them

When you are reaching out to your unhappy customers, make it truly meaningful by taking an immediate corrective action. To make this initiative more sincere, extend them an open invitation to come and retry your service free of cost. When your customers accept your request, make sure that you’re ready to exceed their expectations this time around. Have your best staff member or an executive to attend to them to ensure everything is done as expected.

Step 3: Take feedback and share with the world

When you complete the follow up service with the customer, don’t hesitate to ask your customer to share their feedback regarding their follow up experience. Take this as an opportunity to communicate that as a hard-working small business owner, you sincerely value your customers.  Let them know that you’re prepared to make the necessary changes if customers are not satisfied.

Lastly, ask your customers to share a Facebook post or tweet regarding their follow up experience with your business. Once your customer posts about how pleased they were with their recent experience, then share their update with your online audience. For instance, you can create a specific blog post that features your customer.

Make sure that you narrate the story around how you managed to change their experience through your dedicated customer experience efforts. Also, don’t hesitate to share a screenshot of the Facebook post or tweet shared by your customers on your blog post. Then go ahead and share across all social media platforms, where the visibility of your business matters.

With this simple approach, you can very easily turn the bad experience into a positive one. This will help you reassure your customers about your services and your dedication to customer service. It will also make them understand that you don’t mind going the extra mile to make your customers happy. Also, when potential clients read about this story, it will put your business in a good light. Negative reviews no longer have to be a red flag for potential customers. They are real and can be harmful if not addressed properly, but the good news is that if they are handled with the right approach, you can turn it into a win for your business. So don’t let the next negative review leave a blemish on the reputation of your business, turn it into a five star win for customer service.

As always, drop me a line if you have questions and be on the lookout for our next blog.

Ken G.