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How To Deal With Bad Online Reviews

Oh poo I got a 1 Star Bad Review

Calm down, it will be OK. It’s not the end of the world if you have just received a 1 or 2 star bad review. Bad reviews can happen to anyone. And it doesn’t mean your business is bad if you have a couple of these reviews. Knowing how to deal with bad reviews is half the battle. Which is what we will cover in the first part of this article. In the second part of the article is how to stop bad ones from being posted to the major review sites in the first place.

What to do with your first bad review

This is the  first piece of advice I give my clients when coaching them on how to deal with their bad reviews, and their online reputation. Take the review offline whenever possible. There is no need to get into a heated debate over who’s right an who’s wrong. Apologize to the customer and leave your direct contact information so they can get a hold of you and you can attempt to mitigate the damages. Offer them some sort of incentive to come back to your place of business like a coupon. Even if the customer never returns other people will see that you handled the problem and take that into account when deciding if they spend their money with you.

Customers will be more likely to remove or revise the review if you handle things in a professional manner. A lots of businesses we manage have offered to deduct something from their bill, give a partial refund, or even a full refund. Trust me. Maintaining a positive online reputation is far more important than refunding any one customer.

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Monitor Your Reviews

If your a business owner and you don’t have time to respond to reviews you will need assign this role to a manager or someone in HR. You can also choose to outsource this service and we recommend that for many businesses. A reputation company will monitor all of the major review sites to make sure that your getting quality reviews. It’s also a good idea to get your staff to collect email addresses and or tell your customers to review you online. Remember people usually only go online to review a place if they have had a bad experience.

Respond To Reviews

Getting Bad Reviews Removed From Yelp and Other Sites

As a last ditch effort there is one way you can try to get a bad review removed from yelp. That is to simply report the review and say it violates the TOS. There are several reasons a review can be removed from yelp. Some reasons that yelp will remove a bad review are: a previous disgruntled employee, threats of violence, or verbal abuse slander and harassment. These are only some of the reasons a review can get removed.

A lot of times peoples views are out of anger and they include things that violate some of the major review sites TOS. If you feel that any review is in violation of the TOS just report it. The worst they company can do is just leave the review on their.

How To Get Good Online Reviews

Getting happy customers to review your business online may seem like a challenge but there are a few simple ways to get them to review your business internally.

You always want to take internal reviews in case they are bad then you can mitigate them from being posted to major review sites.

5 Way to collect internal reviews

  1. Embed a Review Widget on your Website.
  2. Email the customer a link to review your business.
  3. Print a QR Code that offers a discount when the customer fills out a review form.
  4. Put a iPad up in your establishment so the customer can review right there.
  5. Put an iPad in the customers hand an ask them for a review.

No one way of collecting internal reviews is better than another. There are many different business out there and some methods just may work better for some than others.

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Capture Internal Reviews

By capturing internal reviews your allow customers to review your business internally.

This is how it works:

If a customer gives you a bad review say 3.9 stars or less, you’re instantly notified. And the customer that left the bad review is immediately responded to with an auto response that you can configure. From there you can respond to the customer appropriately. Responding to the customer and solving the issue in a timely manner stops the customer from going to external review sites and leaving you bad feedback.

If the customer give you a good review. The customer is thanked and a list of suggested review sites are populated. All the customer has to do is click ” Share Review” on the appropriate site and the review is then posted to a site like Yelp, Trip Advisory, or Google.

Hire a Reputation Management Company

What is a reputation management company? A company that provides reputation management services will monitor your online reviews and respond to them. They will have proven solutions to generate you good reviews from your customers and stop the bad ones. To Date our company has stopped over 20,000 bad reviews from being posted on major review websites. We have created a state of the art internal software program that monitors all the top review sites and notifies your business if a bad review is listed.

Please fill out the form below if your interested in fixing your online reputation.

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