How do you turn negative reviews into a positive experience? Bad reviews don’t have to result in loss of business. This is your chance to retain customers. Use it as an opportunity to attract more customers. When life hands you lemons…get ready to whip up a batch of lemonade! Learn how to turn those bad reviews into a good interaction and potentially gain more customers because of it.
Everyone reads reviews online. Sometimes these reviews can be the deciding factor of whether or not a potential customer will even visit your store at all. It all comes down to showing your customers that you care about their opinion. Bad reviews are going to happen. In fact, you want them to happen. If every review for your site is a positive one your customers might think those are fake reviews.
We get that when these negative reviews are posted on your social media pages EVERYONE can see it. Use this as an opportunity to attract more customers. You’ll need to monitor the sites you are on closely. Check all your social media sites regularly, as well as other places like Google or Yelp. Consider setting up Google Alerts for your company name. This will prompt an email to be sent to you anytime a customer mentions your company name online.
Respond to these reviews quickly. The longer these reviews are left unresolved the more likely other possible customers are to see it, and the more likely you are to lose that potential customer and more. Time is of the essence. Ignoring it sends the message of you don’t care. Show them you do care by responding quickly.
Don’t take it personally. Your customers are not on a mission to shut you down. They just want to be heard. At the end of the day they had a bad experience and you need to be listening to these experience so you can learn how to improve it going forward. In your reply make sure you are polite, empathetic, and professional. Win the hearts of your customers by showing them you care. Don’t just respond to customer reviews because you have to. Read the review and respond appropriately.
If you need to take an issue offline that’s fine. Don’t leave viewers hanging though, be sure to follow-up on that review. Is it better to have no reviews than to have bad reviews? In this day, probably not. You want to be included in the conversation. To help improve your customer service we recommend sharing these reviews with your employees, both the good ones and the bad ones.
Source: smallbusiness.wa.gov, cintas.com
retailconnection 