The short answer is no, you can’t, but you can manage a bad review to demonstrate your professionalism and commitment to customer satisfaction. Receiving a bad review is not the end of the world for a business, there are two sides to every story and often more to a bad review, then what the reviewer is sharing.
As a business owner, it can be easy to become emotionally invested when someone isn’t happy with your product or service, when really the best way to overcome a situation like this is to remove your emotion, be professional and respond as quickly as you can.
Here’s 5 things you can do when you get a bad Facebook or Google Review:
1. Reach out
As a business, it’s imperative that you show your customers that you care about them. If you receive a bad review, don’t panic. Reach out to the customer and depending on the context, acknowledge fault and apologise. Follow up with action to compensate for their bad experience and ask if they would consider removing their review. If there’s the opportunity to handle the situation as soon as it surfaces, the less chance it has in causing more damage.
2. Respond
Always respond. We’ve seen time and time again, businesses that fail to or take too long to respond causes more issues or simply look like they don’t care. The focus here is to understand the situation, and defuse it before it escalates. Don’t try and provoke it, or argue your point – because it could ruin your business reputation. Respond immediately, offer your name and number and attempt to take it offline by saying something like “Hey, I am sorry to hear you had this negative experience, please call me on x as I’d like to talk more, thanks John.”
3. Push it Down
As a business owner, there’s likely to be the occasional bad review, and you’ll find its probably outnumbered 50-1 by the good ones. If there is a particularly bad review and you are worried about it being at the top, you can reach out to loyal, happy clients ask if they can leave a review. This helps push the bad one down, and to reflect what your customers really think.
4. Fake Reviews
The best defence is a good offence. Fake reviews have become an increasing trend over the years and the best way to respond is to make it clear to other consumers that you are aware of the review and you’re taking considerable action.
Here are steps to report a fake review:
- Hover over the review and click the ‘flag icon’
- Click the Flag icon and fill out details on the policy violation page
It’s important to keep in mind that even after flagging the review on Google or Facebook, doesn’t necessarily mean it will be taken down and sadly its generally not.
We suggest also replying and politely calling out the questionable nature of the review.
- “Hi James, we have checked out client file and enquiry file and have no record of dealing with you in our business. As we hold quality to the highest standard can you email at x or phone me at y, so I can understand how this issue occurred and then I can take steps to help resolve it.”
5. Block a Serial Harasser
If reaching out and trying to deal with the situation in a professional manner over Facebook, hasn’t worked and the customer seems to become more inflamed and start negatively affecting your page, you may need to delete and block them from the page.
Here’s how to block someone from your Facebook page:
A bad review can be viewed as an opportunity. It can be a way to showcase your customer service and the level of care you have for them. As a business owner, it’s important to encourage your customers to leave reviews of their experience to validate the authenticity of your product or service.
We’ll leave you with this gem!
If you’re looking at finding out more information about customer service and social media management, please don’t hesitate to book a call with us today!
