Episode Description:

In this episode learn how to handle a bad review. No matter what type of business you are in, it’s inevitable at some point you will end up with a bad review online. Managing your online reputation is essential to long-term success and building trust.  A bad review is actually an incredible opportunity to turn an angry customer into a brand advocate. Don’t blow the opportunity – taking the wrong approach can leave your business with a lifelong enemy with a powerful voice.

Action you can take right now:

The goal of this podcast is to provide marketing and service insights, but also to provide actionable items that can occur right away without much thought. This episode is the first, but also has a clear call to action of things you can do right this moment without thought or analysis paralysis.

1. Google Your Business Name or Your Name and Title
2. Are their negative reviews on Google?
3. If you sell online, check reviews on all your sales platforms.
4. Quickly thank those who have left a positive review.
5. Note the names and any relevant information of those who left negative reviews.
6. Search sales history, emails, or any relevant database and see if you can find out more details
7. If you find details, reach out to customer and rectify using the strategies presented in this episode, otherwise post a response stating your having trouble finding anything their sale/service call – and ask them, as a response to the review if they can provide any additianal information about the engagement so you can take immediate action at rectifying the problem.

After-Show Thoughts:

A few weeks after recording an episode I’ll go back and listen to see if my thoughts have changed, or I’ve learned any new insights relevant to the episode.

While addressing bad reviews is the focus of this episode, it’s really part of a more important task of managing your online reputation as a whole. There are other elements to your businesses online reputation other than review websites. Most importantly you… You are an extension of your business – how is your personal reputation online? When people search your business and maybe search you, what will they find?

Think about the broader sphere of what encompasses “reputation”.

Transcript from Episode 1 of the Marketing and Service with Justin Varuzzo podcast.

How to Handle a Bad Review

(00:00):

Imagine you could take an angry customer who just left you a one-star review online and not only turn them into your biggest fan, but turn them into a brand ambassador that more coming right up on the marketing and service.com podcast, your small business tool kit.

(00:26):

Well, you’re going to have a situation where no matter what you do, and no matter how much you try to appease your customers, someone is going to leave you a bad review since we’re talking about reviews. I think the first thing that is first and foremost important is that you actually are monitoring the internet for reviews for your brand or your products or your business, depending on, on which one this is relevant to. There are several services out there such as mentioned.com, hootsuite.com. There’s a ton of them. Uh, some are free, some charge, a nominal fee, the least expensive and free way to monitor your brand online is to just use Google’s own tool, which is called Google alerts. With Google alerts. You can basically tell Google that every time a certain word is mentioned on Google, you will get an alert for it. So in this case, it can be your company name, your brand name, or your product name, or maybe a particular model number or a combination of all of those things.

(01:24):

You can have unlimited Google alerts and each time that word shows up on Google, you will get an email with an alert that shows you where and what was said. This is a great first step in monitoring the internet for your brand reputation. So now that you’ve been out there looking for reviews, you stumble upon this bad review and it always stings to read a review that tells you that you did a terrible job and that you treated a customer poorly. And of course it does have a negative impact on your business. When people search Google, they’re looking for your business, they’re looking for reviews. And then they see something that says, you’re horrible. That can damage your reputation and it can make it difficult to acquire new customers. If the general vibe is that you are not a good company, this is one of the things I think many small business owners struggle with the most is how to respond effectively to these reviews.

(02:13):

I often see reviews that either completely are ignored, which is the absolute worst thing you can do. The second worst thing you can do is respond to the review and be defensive about it and disrespectful and not acknowledge the complaint that’s being made. And this isn’t just unique to small business. I see this even in medium sized businesses, and even some large businesses have taken to offering canned responses where they’ll say something like, Oh, we’re so sorry. You were not happy with our product. Please reach out to us via private message and we’ll be happy to handle your request. So in one aspect, they are acknowledging that they saw the review, which is good, but they’re not offering any public solution. They’re not saying they’re going to fix the problem. They’re simply offering you to reach out to them. And in many instances, when you do, you will not be treated the way you would expect to be treated.

(03:02):

This is why in a small business, you have a huge, huge marketing opportunity with reviews. Even with bad reviews, you have a huge marketing opportunity. As you know, my goal with this podcast is to take service and make it a fundamental staple of your marketing plan. I think that is so important. And I think this is the perfect example that encapsulates why this is such a huge, important aspect of marketing online. So in evaluating reviews, it’s also important to go beyond just your simple review sites. So if you sell something on Amazon, you probably will have your Amazon reviews. If you sell things on eBay, you’ll get your eBay feedback. If you sell on your own website, you may have some type of integrated review system, or you’re going to Google, and you’re seeing reviews that people leave about your business on Google. But what about the reviews that aren’t reviews, but actual conversations, examples of this would be internet forums, Facebook groups, and things of that nature.

(03:59):

These are places where people may be having long winded discussions about your business and what’s happening. And these are a little bit harder to identify because they’re not always public. But the advice that I give in these instances is exactly the same as my advice is going to be in responding to a negative review on one of the more common inevitably, at some point, someone’s going to reach out to you and say, Hey, I was on this Facebook group. And I saw this person wrote this horrible experience they had with your company. And you need to be able to interject yourself into that conversation and engage that customer in a way that’s going to be helpful to them and is going to be a marketing opportunity for your business. So now that we’ve learned about monitoring social media for reviews, the next part is going to be about engaging.

(04:41):

You should always engage with reviews, whether it’s a positive review or a negative review. If someone leaves a five-star review and talks about how great their interaction was with your business, this is a great opportunity to reach out and thank them. It’s easy to blow these off and not think about it, but you have to consider the time and patience. Someone takes to sit down after they utilize your service or product, open up a web browser, go to a review site and then share an entire story about the engagement they had with your business. The best thing you can do is be thankful that these people have taken the time and show your appreciation to them. And we’ll talk about that a little bit later. Some things you can do for the people who leave you positive reviews, but I think what’s most important is that you’re present wherever reviews are left you as the business owner or someone within your organization, to be a single point that is everywhere.

(05:29):

Reviews are, there should never be a review without that person being attached to it in one way or another. So now I’m going to get to the juicy part of how to actually best engage with a negative review. The first thing to do is try to determine what type of bad review is this. And what I mean is there are several types of bad reviews. One would be a fake review. This could be from a competitor. That’s not happy that you’re offering a product or service in a similar space as them. And they have gone out of their way to leave you a negative review, which is not based on a real customer. And it is not based on a real interaction. One of the ways you’re going to learn to filter these out is by seeking massive amounts of information about the transaction. Before you engage with that customer, you want to know what happened, what they purchased, where they purchased it, how the purchase went down or what the issue was with the service, where was the point of failure?

(06:24):

What went wrong? These are all things that you really want to try to extract. So you can address each one of them from an intelligent viewpoint. Another type of review is a distortion of real events. Perhaps someone came in with an appointment and was 20 minutes late. And because they were 20 minutes late, you had to shift their appointment to another day. They’re now outraged because they drove an hour. Even though they were 20 minutes late, their anger, they want to take out on you. So they leave a bad review about how horrible your company is because they drove an hour and their appointment was canceled. When the reality is their appointment was canceled because they showed up 20 minutes late. This is what I call a distortion of real events. We can’t dismiss that. It happened, the person did come, they did have an appointment and they did lose it.

(07:06):

And for one reason or another, they were very upset about it. So we do have to address these very seriously and we have to engage these people like we would engage anyone else who’s unhappy with your business. The other type of bad review is simply a bad review. This is someone who genuinely had a really bad interaction. Maybe a employee was having a bad day and treated someone with disrespect. Maybe something actually just went wrong and you made a mistake in your business and that’s okay. Everyone makes mistakes every single day. And you shouldn’t be judged on the mistakes you make, but you should be judged on how you handle those mistakes after the fact. And this is where you have that opportunity to shine. So the first step, as I mentioned before, is trying to track this back to a real customer. You have this review.

(07:47):

Do, did they leave a name? Did they say anything in the review that could help you determine who they are? Naturally. The first thing in a simple review, if it just says one star, this company is terrible dot, dot, dot. This is a great opportunity to reply in a public way and say, I’m so sorry for the inconvenience. I would love to learn more about your interaction and see how I can help make this better for you. Can you please let me know what you purchased or here is my cell phone number. Here’s my email address. Here is every way you can contact me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever you want to give them unlimited options to reach out. You want them to reach out. You don’t want them to ignore this. If they are genuinely on the happy and they see that you’re making an attempt to make it better, and it’s a genuine bad review, then there is a good chance they will reach out and express their frustration.

(08:39):

I can’t stress enough how important it is to offer all your contact information publicly. I realize this can be a bit daunting. And now everybody has access to your email or your phone number. You can set up a Google number. You can do anything that makes it so you can offer this information out. The reason this is so important is potential. Customers will look at these bad reviews. It’s the first thing so many people do today. Even yourself. You probably look something up on Amazon. And the first thing you’re going to do is jump to those reviews and say, what don’t people like about this product. And when you see a bunch of negative reviews with no response and no engagement, you assume that they’re all true. Now, if you see a product that has a lot of great reviews, and it has a few bad reviews, but in the bad review, every single time the owner or a principal operator of the business reached out to that customer and offered to help, you may think, okay, maybe the product I get might not be perfect, but at least now I’m confident that if I’m one of the unlucky people who get the bad one, perhaps I’ll have the opportunity to get an exchange.

(09:38):

And I know the company is going to stand behind their product. That’s what this is about. It’s about building trust. I mentioned this in one of the other episodes, the importance of increasing trust. Every moment you have with a customer, every interaction should be an interaction that helps the trust needle move forward for that customer and your business. So again, you want to be proactive in offering your information publicly. Your goal is that this person will reach out and you will have the opportunity to have a conversation with them, whether it’s email or a phone call or private messages on a social network. The goal is always to have the conversation. Most people who are angry just want to be heard. And if you let them speak and you listen to their concerns and you address them one by one, you will generally have an amazing opportunity to turn that person into a fan.

(10:29):

Very early on. When we first started selling on the internet, I remember getting a bad review and I was devastated. I reached out to that person and I said, what happened? What did we do wrong? What went wrong? In this particular instance, someone had ordered a product we had immediately shipped at the same day, by a chance of luck. It got lost in the mail. Rightfully so the is angry. They expected a product within a day or two, and it never showed up. So after getting this customer on the phone and listening to their concerns, I said, allow me to do a little bit of research on this and find out exactly what went wrong. And I’m going to call you back probably in the next 20 minutes or so this is when I started doing the investigation stage. I wanted to know everything that happened and I wanted information and I wanted my information to be accurate.

(11:09):

So when I responded to this customer, 20 minutes later, I’d have every concern addressed. As soon as I hung up the phone, I started to do some research about that. Customer’s transaction. The first thing I saw was my receipt with the tracking number on it. And naturally I went to track the package. And thankfully I saw that we had shipped it right away, but that it was lost in the mail and it had never been delivered. This was great because this made the job easier. I was able to shift the blame, although it doesn’t make the problem better. I was able to shift the blame to the postal service instead of having to accept the fact that we screwed up and forgot to ship something or shipped it to the wrong address. About 10 minutes later, I called the customer back. And I said, I did some investigating into this issue that you had.

(11:48):

And I found that the item had shipped the same day. And here’s the tracking number I encourage to look so you can see just to confirm that we did actually get it out the door that day. I have no idea what happened. And I apologize. This is obviously something that’s a little bit out of my control, but I want to make this better for you. So that sounds pretty obvious. That’s I think how typically most people would handle that situation. Here’s where people start to struggle and not always make the correct decisions. What is your ultimate goal at this point? Can we get the customer to remove the bad review touchy subject? Uh, personally, I would never ask a customer regardless of what we do for them straight up to remove a bad review. There’s something that seems a bit unethical about it, and it just doesn’t seem right.

(12:36):

Even if you make the situation right, don’t expect that they are going to remove the bad review. Instead, what I generally ask is if we are able to resolve all the differences and I do make the customer happy, I will ask at the very end of the process. Sometimes this can be weeks after the problem is rectified. I want to let a little bit of time for the anger to simmer, and then I might reach out and ask them. It would mean the world to me. If you would take a moment to update your review, to reflect that we corrected this situation for you. I will tell you that nine out of 10 times, instead of updating the review, they will either remove the review entirely because now they feel bad or they’ll update the review and they’ll update the star rating from one star to five stars and say, wow, I had this issue, but here’s an update.

(13:27):

This company is incredible. They fixed everything they did at facet did it for free. And two days later I had my product and I had a coupon for something else, or I had a freebie. So here in lies that overlap between service and marketing. What do you spend on marketing? How much money do you spend to acquire a new customer? I really want you to think about this for a moment. I also want you to think if there was a magic way you could pay to have a bad review removed from the internet, what would you pay for it? Would you pay $5? Would you pay $20? I mean, obviously this has more to do with what product or service you’re offering and how many bad reviews you have. If you’re selling a bubblegum and you have 45,000 positive reviews, and one person says the gum sucks, then chances are, this is not really going to have any impact on your business.

(14:16):

If you’re selling something far more expensive with a higher profit margin, and you only have four reviews, and now the fifth person says that this is horrible. Now this is going to be a problem. Uh, and this can cost you a lot of money in lost customer acquisition and in brand reputation. So when you call this customer back and you offer solutions, think about how much you want to spend on those solutions. And if spending that money is worth it or not, for example, you could say this was lost in the mail and you could try to recover it. And the customer could wait weeks and weeks, and then maybe finally received the package, or you can just simply ship them another one and maybe even pay for overnight shipping with tracking and provide that to the customer. And now you’ve made them happy. They get their product overnight.

(14:59):

Now, maybe that costs $35 to do overnight shipping. Uh, and let’s say the product is a $25 or $50 product. Uh, let’s say you are a hundred dollars in now that you’ve just lost on this, but this customer now becomes a loyal customer, a brand advocate and a fan of your business. And they update that review or they remove it. Now, is it worth a hundred dollars in most instances? Yes, of course it is. This is why it’s important to chalk these up as marketing expenses. This is not a cost of doing business. This is a marketing expense you are taking and leveraging an opportunity to make an angry customer happy and to increase the likelihood of having that customer become a repeat customer and the word of mouth that customer is now going to go and brag to all their friends about what an amazing company they dealt with.

(15:49):

There is no question that it is worth a hundred dollars to have a bad review removed from the internet. So what happens if you go through this whole process and the customer does not update the review and they do not remove the review, here’s an opportunity to respond to the review and just confirm the actions that you took to correct the situation in a very positive way. An example of this would be thank you so much for leaving this review. I’m so sorry again, that you had this issue. I hope that by us replacing this item and shipping it to you overnight, that it demonstrated our commitment to you and how seriously we take customer service in our business. I do just want to go back a little bit again and talk about offering options, give your customer options. Don’t dictate to them what you will do for them, let them more or less dictate to you what they want.

(16:43):

I think of one experience I had with a extremely angry customer. I had gotten a message that, uh, there was a very, very angry customer and I called this person and they just started unloading. I said, nothing for probably about six minutes straight while this person unloaded everything at the end of that six minute tirade, I simply said, I’m here to help you. What can I do to make this right? And honestly, I was prepared to go pretty far to make this right. And there was a brief pause. And then the customer responded. I would really like a refund for my subscription. Last month. The reality is I would have given this person a refund for their subscription for the entire year to keep them in our good graces and to avoid the potential for them leaving a bad review. I responded. Are you sure?

(17:32):

Is there anything else I can do for you? I want to make sure that you are completely satisfied and 100% happy. I take this business extremely seriously and anything that goes wrong with this business. I take as a reflection of myself, I then said, there’d be absolutely no issue giving you a refund for the last month subscription. Suddenly the whole demeanor of that customer changed and the whole tenor of the conversation shifted. This person was relieved. They weren’t expecting anything. They expect the worst, and it really hit me after I hung up that phone, how low the expectations are in today’s world. We typically are not treated well by businesses. We feel like we always pay, pay, pay, and we always get very little in return. It’s become such commonplace in today’s world that when a business goes out of their way, just a little bit, it seems like an extraordinary event.

(18:23):

One example that I’ll call out of a company that really went above and beyond in the smallest way. But in the most special way was Ruth’s Chris steakhouse, my wife and I had reservations and we showed up about 20 minutes early for our reservation because we were in a city traveling and we weren’t sure how far away the restaurant was going to be. And we got there and we got there much sooner than we expected. After about a half hour, a lovely hostess came out with a tray of champagnes. She expressed her sincerest apologies for the 10 minute delay on our reservation and offered us free champagne. My wife and I clinked our glasses together, made a toast, and it was the most memorable experience of the entire vacation and experience. We still talk about today. What was the cost of two flutes of champagne to a restaurant?

(19:08):

This was an incredible token of appreciation. They didn’t have to do this. We weren’t expecting, I think that we weren’t upset. It was only a few minutes. Like we were waiting for three hours for a reservation. And about five minutes after our Champaign was served, we were seated at our table and enjoyed a lovely dinner. But as someone in marketing, it really made me think, how often does this happen? And I want you to think about this. When was the last time you were blown away by the service of a business that you deal with? I’m not talking, you just had a positive experience. I mean, you were blown away. This company went above and beyond in a way you could never have imagined. It’s probably a pretty hard thing to think about. And you probably have one or two examples that come right to the front of your head.

(19:51):

And if you had to ask for more than those two examples, you’d really have to go back and think about businesses that you’ve dealt with in the past. Isn’t that a sad state of affairs that it’s that hard to think about one incredible interaction you’ve had with a business. So with that in the back of your mind, think about this. When you respond to that review, you don’t just want to acknowledge it. You want to take this opportunity to create that experience for that customer. You want that customer to end their day and say, wow, that was way above and beyond. That was incredible. Even if you lose a little money on the deal, and even if it’s a customer that you think will never return to your business, again, it doesn’t take a lot for someone to feel that you’ve made an extraordinary attempt to make them happy.

(20:38):

So in reality, there’s little excuse for anyone to be leaving a bad review in the first place. And if you’re getting played with bad review after bad, then you really have to start to look inside, look in the mirror and see what are you doing wrong as a business person? That’s upsetting. So many of these people, I think for most businesses, bad reviews will usually make up maybe 10%, 15%. Uh, even that I think is, is, is a, is a high number I expect with any product, no matter what it is, especially in the restaurant business, where things are art, when you’re selling a product and there’s a certain defect rate, uh, you know that there’s going to be people who might have something that breaks or it doesn’t function properly, or maybe they don’t like the meal. They don’t like the haircut they got.

(21:21):

And those things are subjective. And you are going to get a bad review from time to time, no matter how great you are, but what really defines you as a business and defines you as a person is how you handle it. When someone does have an issue, do you acknowledge it? Do you appreciate it? Are you sincere about it? And are you willing to go the extra mile to make it right? So now I want to just talk briefly about the fake reviews that we talked about before these have to be approached delicately. The last thing you can do is go out and just call it out as a fake review. This will get you nowhere, the person who left it doesn’t care, they’ve already tarnished your reputation. That was their goal in the first place. And now your potential new customers who see this bad review will assume that anytime someone leaves a bad review, you just blow it off as fake generally in these instances, just as, before you can reply to the review that you suspect is fake.

(22:13):

And you can ask for additional information. When was the date of your purchase? Whom was the person you interacted with whatever intelligence you can gather to help you investigate whether this was true or false. It’s unlikely that the person will ever respond, but at least when prospective customers see the bad review, they’ll see that you attempted to reach out and you try to make the issue correct. And that person clearly ignored you again, leave your phone number, leave an email address, encourage them to private message you on a social media site. Anything you can do to get them to engage. Uh, even though, you know, they won’t, at least people see that you are paying attention and that you have your pulse on the sentiment of your business online. And then for the reviews that are distortions of real events, I’m going to go to a real life scenario.

(22:58):

I had a fairly negative experience with an automotive repair company. And when I looked at their reviews, I found that there were several bad reviews. One of them alleged that the auto repair shop cracked their windshield. It was a very long review from a frustrated customer who, whether or not they actually thought they broke the windshield, or they were just trying to get a free windshield. I’m not sure that remains to be seen, but in this case, the owner of the business was actually able to pull video footage after identifying who this person was, uh, and put pictures from the security footage of the car pulling in where you could clearly see the windshield was cracked. When the customer was arriving at the location, they were very careful to blur out the license plate and the person’s face. This was not to shame the person.

(23:52):

This was simply to acknowledge. We saw this negative review. We took it extremely seriously. We were deeply concerned that one of our staff may have damaged your windshield. And after determining the day and the technician, we went back to the footage to determine exactly what happened. Of course, we understand how frustrating it can be to see that you have a crack in your windshield after having your car service. And we also understand how easy it can be sometimes to miss these cracks determined, depending on the lighting, depending on how quickly it spreads. It was a very positive way to respond to a angry customer who potentially could have it been just trying to get a free windshield, but it was not defensive. They didn’t say you’re lying. They gave that customer the benefit of the doubt and said, you probably just didn’t notice it, which may have very well been the truth, but here we’re at least providing some information to show you that it was not us.

(24:43):

And that’s okay. It’s okay to defend yourself, but it’s not okay to do it defensively. If that makes sense, they could have done exactly the same thing with the same pictures and said, see, told you so it wasn’t us, but then that would have taken a whole different tambour. But then that response would have seemed far more defensive and inappropriate. One last thing regarding responding to negative reviews in the event, the person who left the review does not reply to your response or does not reach out to you when defending yourself in a polite and positive and in an encouraging manner. It’s always important to leave yourself a way out if this is not the case. If we miss something, if something changed and I wasn’t aware of it, if these weren’t the circumstances, I thought all phrasing like that is nice phrasing that lets the customer know that you may be making a set of assumptions.

(25:36):

Even if you know they’re factual, but you may be making a set of assumptions and that if any of your assumptions are wrong, you want them to call you out. And you want them to mention what the issues are this way. When they don’t respond. The prospect who sees this review will look and see that you’ve acknowledged it. And that you’ve inquired. If there’s anything in that response that was not accurate. And then see that the original reviewer never responded to that. Which likely means that either one, they didn’t see it or two, they were happy with the resolution. What it really comes down to is it doesn’t matter what a person writes. It only matters what people see it and how it affects their decision to do business with you. Being engaged goes a long way. You want to avoid that canned responses. You want to avoid blanket statements.

(26:21):

You want to avoid any accusations. You just want to resolve the issue effectively. And with sincerity in my experience, I’d say about 80% of negative reviews are able to be rectified in a public way with the review, either being changed, updated, or removed. And even if someone leaves the one-star review and say, Oh, the company reached out and they tried to make things right, but I was so disgust. I didn’t want to deal with them anymore. That may happen. But again, that probably happens 20% of the time. And again, it shows that you acknowledged it and you attempted to make it right smell. Let’s shift gears to a more positive note. The people who are leaving you, the five-star reviews, these are people that you want to thank as we mentioned earlier. And I think one of the ways that you can do this one is to reach out both publicly and privately, to thank them for taking the time to do such a nice thing for your business.

(27:12):

A personalized response is critical. You don’t just want a canned response to every review that says, thank you for the great review. We appreciate your business instead, try to make it personal. If you have the opportunity to, for example, thank you so much for leaving the review. Debra. I know when we spoke on the phone, you were on your way to Disney and I hope you enjoyed your vacation. Thanks again, we look forward to serving all your needs in the future. You should also give that customer call a week later and just say, Hey Debra, thank you so much for doing that. I just wanted to reach out again and I really appreciate it. It means a lot to me, and it means a lot to my business to get that type of feedback. Hope all is well, have a great day. Hopefully this helps you in your small business or your big business in handling reviews. It has to be done. Carefully words need to be chosen carefully and you can be very successful using these strategies. I would love to hear how this is working out for you. Definitely check out our website, marketing and service.com. We will have some additional content regarding negative reviews on the website. You can always shoot me an email@justinatmarketingandservice.com. Let me know how we’re doing. Let me know how you’re enjoying the podcast. Something I miss something you want to add. Keep me posted. Thanks for listening. I really hope this content helps move your business forward.

(28:37):

[inaudible].