Best Practices When Addressing Negative Reviews

When receiving negative feedback, businesses focus on engaging directly with the customer, showing the willingness to solve the issue, and offering them an easy way to contact the company. This is all related to the customer-facing aspect of dealing with negative reviews. Just as important, is to have a structured approach behind the scenes.

Respond in a Timely Manner

Responding in a timely manner is crucial and depends heavily on how your team is set up. Over 50 percent of customers who have written reviews expect a response in seven days or less.

Around 25% of consumers have an even shorter time frame, expecting to hear back from the business within three days.

Set your team up to receive review alerts so you are notified on time. Additionally, to avoid logging in and out of every review site manually, you can use a review response tool. Keep in mind that customers are waiting to hear back from you from the time they posted their review.

Assign Responsibility

Identify the people within your company who can be directly involved with responding to negative reviews. Getting it right is more complicated than it seems, because reviews are at the crossroads of marketing, operations, social media, and customer service.

Usually branch managers, social media teams, marketing teams, and customer service department are the people who are tasked with reviewing feedback and managing the company’s response.

The most important thing is to make it clear who is in charge of responding to reviews. It simplifies the process while also decreasing your review response time.

Whoever takes the lead of the review response program should have a good understanding of guidelines on each review site. They should be able to transform the collected feedback into valuable insights for the company, and have a proper approach when addressing complaints.

Create a Review Response Policy

If your business has multiple locations or branches, chances are more than one person will be assigned to respond to online reviews.

This means that your organization needs a review response policy that will guide staff on how they should proceed when customer reviews are posted online.

The policy should cover things like what language and tone they should use, what the timeline is for getting back to customers, who should be made aware within the organization in particular situations, and other aspects that may impact how your company handles reviews.