How To Handle Negative Reviews

By Mike Munter

Handling negative reviews requires a little bit of finesse and this video explains how to deal with online customer complaints in a way that you can convert a negative experience into a positive one for your business.

Affordable Reputation Management Video Transcript 

Hi. This is Mike Munter with Affordable Reputation Management. Today, we’re going to talk about how to handle negative reviews.

I got a call the other day from a business owner who has some negative reviews on Yelp website, and there are kind of two things that you want to do. Obviously, one thing you want to do is, you want to respond to these reviews and try to mitigate the damage that the negative views are doing. And the second thing you want to do is, you want to try to push those reviews down so they’re not showing for your Google search results when you type your business name in.

So, what I’m going to talk about today is the first part of that equation which is how to handle the negative reviews. Okay, the first thing that I always think of for a negative review, when I use to run a business back in monthly baseball, every complaint was an opportunity. I saw it as a great opportunity to turn that disgruntled customer into a lifetime customer. And if you have that mindset going in, I think it really helps to set the stage for a nice positive interaction.

So, what’s next?  The next thing is the letter E which stands for empathy and, you know, no matter what the person says about your business you have to empathize with them.  You have to look at it from their perspective and try to understand, you know, where the confusion came in, how they felt the way they did.

And the next thing you want to remember is O for offer.  You want to make an offer to them to - after you empathize - how can you make good on the situation if it was, you know, they had a bad meal at a restaurant, offer them a chance to come back in again, and then make sure you give them really good personal service if.  You know, if they’ve bought a car from and you and they had a bad experience, well offer to bring them back into your dealership and if you can swap out to a different car or really go above and beyond and it’s really important as a business owner that you get involved with the transaction at that point because what you want is you want to take this review here and turn it into an actual good review and that will be great.

So, the last thing which kind of goes without saying is to "be nice", you know, remember that whenever someone finds a review of your business online and they see how you have handled it, you’ve addressed it, they’re going to read your replies so make sure that you’re being nice and that you’re handling it in a professional manner and you’re doing the utmost that you can to empathize with the customer, give them a good offer and turn that unhappy customer into a happy customer.

If you have any questions about this video or if you need help perhaps pushing down negative results, that’s what we do here at Affordable Reputation Management. Thank you.