As a business owner or manager, you should be attentive about what’s being written or said about your brand or product online. Reviews show up in a number of places, sites, as well as in comments or full-on posts on blogs and social media platforms.
Here are list of suggestions on how to navigate negative reviews and deal with angry customers:
1. Always Use Empathy: Put yourself in their shoes and try to understand why they feel the way they do. If you sound uncaring or indifferent you will only encourage the person to take further negative action.
2. Don’t blame the customer or some other employee: Take responsibility for the situation and confront it head on. People don’t care whose fault it is, they just want the situation fixed as soon as possible.
3. Take negative conversations posted online, offline immediately: If someone has already posted a bad review, comment or blog post about their experience with your company, get their phone number or address, and try to handle the problem offline.
4. Never address a negative review by getting into an Online Comment battle: It makes you look bad and unprofessional. Do your research, find out who the customer is and contact them.
5. Remove a negative review by turning them into a loyal customer: If it was truly a misunderstanding and you are going out of your way to make it better you can turn a once negative review, into a raving, and pleased customer. Most people that are upset really appreciate the fact that you care enough to make it right and will tell others.
6. Do Not Ignore Bad Reviews or Angry Customers: Address negative reviews and customer complaints right away. Do not think an angry customer will just go away! This is the digital age and it only takes a few minutes for someone to go online and leave a negative review about their bad experience with your company.
7. Act quickly to contact the person: If you promise to make things right, do it and try to do it right away! If the customer has to bug you to get you to follow through with your promise, he or she will never trust you again and probably will not remove the negative review. By acting this way you may motivate them to post even more negative reviews telling people how you didn’t make things right.
8. Ask them if they are willing to remove the negative review: If they are happy and you have cleared up the misunderstanding ask them if they could update or remove the negative review. If they refused you should leave a comment under their review telling others you took action and how you fixed the situation.
