Guidelines To Effectively Respond To Negative Customer Reviews

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Customer reviews are an area where customers can elaborately express themselves. Customer reviews tell stories about previous customers who interacted with a brand with respect to their quality of experience, their issues and concerns.

Bad customer reviews are the result of sub-par customer service. It’s when the customer engages with a company or brand with expectations of receiving a certain level and quality of experience but end up disappointed.

Every businesses seeks to avoid getting bad reviews as it reflects poorly on other prospective customers who perceive the brand reputation based on such feedback.

Businesses must see this level of feedback as an opportunity to highlight pain points in current functioning and improve upon them to enhance future customer experience and prevent customer dissatisfaction along the same lines. It presents an opportunity to clearly understand what’s nagging the customers and work upon fixing it promptly.

Given below are some effective ways by which businesses can handle bad customer reviews and turn them into a learning opportunity.

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Become more acceptive

Negative customer feedbacks do not describe your entire business. It is merely a result of one bad customer experience and so are instance specific. Businesses should see these negative feedbacks as an opportunity to work upon weak areas so as to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Customer reviews are an authentic representation of customer opinions about the business. They highlight problems and provide room for improvement. Customer feedback, whether negative or positive, must be equally welcomed by businesses. Effectively responding to negative customer reviews is a skill that many businesses fail to develop and this reflects poorly on the approach adopted by businesses towards their customers.

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Be apologetic

This is a simple way of gaining customer attention. Being apologetic helps assign responsibility for the mistake that lead to the bad review. In many cases, it may not actually be the company’s fault in the first place, but nonetheless, apologising helps resolve the situation faster. You may feel that the customer is wrongly accusing you of something, but pointing out their mistake in response to a bad customer review wouldn’t be a wise strategy.

A simple “sorry” helps find solutions in an easy way, without creating any fuss. It calms the customer down and shows that the company is bold enough to publicly admit mistakes on their part. It even allows the company to issue clarification and narrow down on the exact area that bothered the customer.

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Be polite

Your tone and content matters a lot when dealing with a dissatisfied customer. Being rude will only aggravate the customer’s anger. It’s very important to let the customer know that you understand their point of view and that you are truly sympathetic. Be careful of the words and structuring of sentences while issuing a reply to a negative feedback. Make the customer feel comfortable by telling them that they did the right thing by expressing their concern.

Adopting a polite tone can be a difficult task but it is essential that the company looks at it from the customer’s point of view. Even a small mistake can make a huge impact on the customer’s perception of the brand’s level of service, especially when the brand is well known for delivering high end customer experience.

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Mention your follow-up

Ensure that the customer who wrote the review has mentioned about the point that bugged them. It could be that the tone of the sales personnel was very rude, lack of product availability, exorbitant pricing, poor after sales service, to name a few.

Try to fill up on all necessary details that are needed to find an optimal solution, either through the review or by contacting the customer. This will help you achieve a directed solution to the customer’s issue.

Make it a point to state what you’ve done to resolve the customer’s issue and how it’ll help them. Publicly responding to a negative review with a solution helps project that the company values it’s customer’s opinions and is diligently devoted to ensuring customer satisfaction.

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Be specific

While answering negative customer reviews , be sure to mention the name of the person you’re replying to. This way the reviewer can locate their specific responses as well as it becomes easy to read for any third person. It is a more interpersonal way of conversing and sends a positive message to the customers who feel that a dedicated person is attending to their issue and they’re not subjected to ignorance by the company. This is far more effective than delivering an automated response that is generic and does not address the specific issue of the customer.

Compensate for the committed mistake

Try to make up for the problem encountered by the customer by offering gifts or incentives. This counts as an effort to make up for the emotional, physical or financial loss to customer caused by the actions of the business. It shows that the company truly regrets their inability to meet the customer’s expectations and is willing to go the extra mile to make up for it.

If the customer did not get timely delivery of a product, wave off the delivery charges; offer additional discount along with free replacement in case a faulty product gets delivered. These tiny gestures make a huge positive impact on reviewers.

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