You can spend years to form a positive brand image, and only in one moment lose everything because of bad feedback. Interestingly, 67-90% (depending on the study) of all consumers look at reviews before purchasing. Below there are results from the survey conducted by Dimensional Research in 2013: notice, that positive feedback has a slightly better influence than negative. So, how to react to the negative feedbacks?
Reasons for writing bad reviews
There is an interesting survey by Trustpilot. They asked 512 North Americans and 492 Europeans about the reasons for leaving bad reviews. Then, they divided all results by gender and region. Key findings:
- The most common reason among women is “To help others make better buying decisions”
- And among men – “To warn the online community”
- There is a curious tendency by region: Americans are more likely motivated to leave bad reviews with the aim to improve company services than Europeans.
Before we start to figure out how to handle negative feedback, let’s clear some points:
- A negative review doesn’t mean that your business is bad
- Such feedbacks show the opportunities which you can use to grow
- There are no difficulties to react to them. And now we are going to show how.
Attention!
A negative review doesn’t mean that your business is bad
1: Do not try to delete or ignore bad reviews
The worse thing you can actually do is to try to ignore negative feedbacks, hide them, or delete them. Please, do not do this! There is a direct road to fail.
2: Understand the problem
Usually, when people leave negative feedback they are annoyed and emotional. you have to keep calm and composure. Listen carefully to all their concerns and try to give a response. One more piece of advice: don’t take the customer’s words as a personal attack. Try to distance your emotional self and take the remarks. And again, keep calm!
3: Do not try to prove that the customer is wrong
Remember the fundamental business rule: “The customer is always right”. Even when he’s wrong. Attempts to prove the opposite will be not helpful. Just let him tell all they want.
4: Ask questions
When you ask questions, you show that you are interested in this issue and want to help.
5: Quickly react and resolve the problem
You as a business owner have to build a consistent process from handling the feedback to solving the problems. If some time is needed to overcome the issue, you have to inform a user about the status periodically. One of the quickest ways to receive user reviews is to implement them on your site Live Chat.
- Unlimited agents and chats
- Design Customization
- Email notifications
- Saved chat history
- Analytics, reporting, and much more.
Customer expectations
According to a survey by Trustpilot (this study was already mentioned), “a vast majority – 88 percent – of people voted for companies to fix the issue at hand and then contact them regarding the solution”. What else is interesting, almost 50% of all customers don’t expect that the company will react to their response. In conclusion, if you want to build trust and long-term relations with your customers, you should remember that every complaint is different. And it is important to find a unique approach to each of them. Also, look at the patterns and situations in negative reviews which are repeated. And then improve your business. Download Free WordPress Plugins by Supsystic.