How To Respond To Negative Reviews To Benefit Your Business?

All things have both sides. That is true for negative reviews. So, if you’ve got some bad customer reviews, don't worry. Negative reviews do not mean bad things as their name, but they may somehow bring you benefits that make you change your mind. In this article, we are going to present you with the unbelievable benefits of bad online reviews to your business and how you can respond to them to make your customers satisfied and have a positive effect on your store. Keep reading if your store is getting bad feedbacks and you are stuck with them.

Why do you need negative reviews on your store?

Reason 1: Negative reviews build up objective reality to your business

One of the best side effects of negative reviews is that they can help you boost the reliability of your store because bad reviews can make the good ones more outstanding and reliable. The statistic about the impact of reviews from Capterra showed that customers will have the intention to trust a store showing off all feedbacks from clients including the good and bad ones more than the others only displaying the positive feedback. It is because they think that store owner is more honest and does not hind anything.

Most online customers have already known that fake reviews are a huge problem in online retail and they are easy to make up for. So they will not totally believe in the products with all 5-star reviews.

In contrast, when a client read both positive and negative feedback from other customers, they think these are real and trust them more. Actually, almost all famous brands like Coca-Cola, KFC, Apple, etc. have both positive and negative reviews on their online website.

Reason 2: Negative reviews help you with marketing.

Whether your testimonials are positive or negative, they have a certain impact on your SEO and marketing. The entrepreneur will save cost for marketing because the product already tells story about it. Then, other people will understand more about your product and service as well as your business. So that you should address the negative reviews on your store in a smart way to make the customers happy and return to your store.

Reason 3: Negative reviews help you improve

Feedbacks, whether good or bad, all make you know more about your business performance. While the good reviews show that your customers are happy and satisfied with your product and service, the negative feedbacks tell you why they are unhappy when shopping in your store. From that, you can think about how to fix it and better your services.

So that if you get a negative review on your store, you should approach it with an open mind and happily deal with different cases of unsatisfied customers. I am sure that you could learn a lot from it and keep your business improve.

All of these are likely to benefit your business in the long run and keep your customers happy and coming back for more, which results in a better conversion rate.

How to respond to negative reviews?

Above is how unsolicited reviews can benefit your business. But do you know how to respond to such issues to make your customers happy and coming back to your store? Keep reading to get the detailed process.

Step 1: Include a sweet salutation with the customer's name

The first notice you have to remember when starting a reply to a customer's comment is saying "Hi" with the name of that customer correctly. They all like being heard individually and addressed personally so that you should avoid generic like "Dear customer", "Hi customer".

And if it is possible, introduce who you are and your role to make them feel this is not a "bot reply" and you are professional and believable.  Below is an example of a good salutation you should try:

"Hi Alex,

I am Alice from Ryviu support team."

Step 2: Say "Thank You"

The second step you need to do when replying to an unhappy review is showing your appreciates and value of that customer feedback by saying "Thank you". It also means that you acknowledge the issue and make the customers feel appreciated.

Below are some different ways you can apply to say thank you to your disgruntled customers:

• "Thank you for your review"
• "Thank you for bringing this to our attention"
• "Thank you for letting us know about this"

Step 3: Apologize and Sympathize

Coming after the thank you is an apology to deeply confirm your issue and make your customers feel sympathized.

Even if it’s not your fault or the customer is in the wrong, you should always say sorry. That not only appeases the customers but is also an ideal way to establish and strengthen trust between you and your customers, which may result in get more customers to come back to shop in your store.

Here are some of the best practices you can try when apologizing your unhappy customers:

• “We apologize that our service did not satisfy your expectations.”
• “We’re so sorry that your experience did not match your expectations. This is on us.”
• “We apologize that our service did not satisfy your expectations. We set a high standard for ourselves, are truly sorry to hear that standard was not met in your interaction with our business."

Step 4: Provide an explanation, if needed

In some cases, an apology is not enough to appease the customers' angry. Then, you’ll need to explain more about your situation to provide your customer with more information and clear up a misunderstanding. Here’s an example of an in-depth explanation following an apology:

"We truly apologize for our late response. We have been coming back from a long traditional holiday and everything seems to be messy. So that, we could not support you as expected."

Step 5: Take responsibility

To be responsible for your false but do not blame for anything else. Even if that issue was an unfortunate incident, an off day, a holiday— you should acknowledge the customer’s bad experience and confirm that is your mistake. Along with it, you should provide reassurance that you offer high-quality service and will take responsibility for the mistake. It shows that you’re willing to change and improve your customer experience

To take an example, you can follow the explanation above like this:

"...we could not support you as expected. We are very regretted for not supporting you timely. We will use the feedback to make us better and to ensure this doesn’t happen again."

Or if you do not provide any explanation, just take your responsibility directly to make your customers happy. You can say something like follows:

• “I’m so sorry. We’re normally known for our exceptional attention to detail, and we regret that we missed the mark.”
• “Thank you for your review and we’re sorry to hear that you did not get a great experience with us. We would like the opportunity to talk and investigate your feedback further.”

Step 6: Make things right

After acknowledging the issue, you now need to correct it. If the issue is easy to fix, you can do it immediately. Once finishing, you shouldn’t be silent about it, but describe what you’ve done to address it, and ask them if they are satisfied. If you could not handle the problem at that time, you should confirm to fix it and tell them when the issue is addressed.  

In case you couldn't fix what happened, you should think about other ways to make the reviewers comfortable by compensating them appropriately.  

There are a lot of ways that you can do to compensate the unsatisfied clients such as offering a coupon discount, giving a gift, cutting off the bill of their order, refunding, or providing free support, etc.

Step 7: Take the issue offline

Last but not least, the best way to show your caring and responsibility is to take the issue offline (off the review page) to talk directly to the customers about the problem they got. In this way, you can also prevent interference from outside sources. To do this, you should provide your direct contact information or ask the customers to leave theirs such as email, phone number, or any other form of contact for further discussion.

This is an example of how you can invite your customer to talk further about the problem.

Bonus

Negative reviews are inevitable in almost all online stores. To obtain the best positive influence from bad online reviews, you are recommended to implement the process above, tackle the problems, and reply to the customers' complaints as soon as possible.

If you know how to manage customers reviews, including the positive and negative ones, you can easily win the business game. In addition to the steps to handle the bad experience feedback, you may need help from a review app that allows you effectively and smartly manage all reviews on your eCommerce site.

Wrapping up

In conclusion, negative reviews or unsatisfied customer experiences don’t mean awful things. If you leverage the right issue-solving methods and an honest and responsible approach and make the client feels that their complaint was heard, you can receive a huge benefit from the unhappy consumers.