How to Handle Customer Negativity and Bad Reviews

Negative feedback can be demotivating and emotionally draining, especially to the owner of a business. You are the founder of the company and sometimes it is easy to take those adverse comments as a personal attack.

The thing is, every business is bound to experience the odd poor review from time to time and this is just due to your clients' personal preferences. So this is the first rule when it comes to handling negativity, to not take things personally when it comes to poor feedback. Why? Because it can affect the way in which you deal with that negative review, especially if you are angry about the feedback that you have received. In the meanwhile, this can then have a bad impact on your business if you are to respond to a complaint in disagreement on a customer facing portal – like social media for example.

However that’s not to say don’t respond at all. Ignoring negative feedback again is one of the worst things you can do. Even if you’re ignoring it, the customer isn’t and neither are the other hundreds of individuals viewing your testimonial pages. So how do you go about rectifying the negativity and re-gaining that clients custom?

The first thing to remember is, everyone makes mistakes sometimes, no one is perfect and quite frankly it’s those little accidents that you learn from to prevent similar situations from happening again in the future. Negative reviews don’t mean that your business is bad. Sometimes it can just be one person’s opinion ‘vs’ another. Not every business is going to be perfect for everyone. It’s like anything, if everyone had the same taste in things then there would be no room for competition or differentiation. The same way if nobody complained, there would never be any room for improvement. So another point is that you shouldn’t let negative feedback deflate you. Instead, take it on the chin, act up on it and use the feedback in a positive way to create solutions so that it won’t happen again. Obviously strive to be the best always, but it’s a guarantee there will still be the odd couple of individuals who have a slightly different idea and therefore they find something to criticise. As we’ve said, this is natural so don’t beat yourself up about it.

Saying that, how should you respond to negativity? As we have mentioned above, the worst thing you can do is disagree with the complaint, even if you do disagree! By responding with an objecting opinion, this can just cause more conflict. As a result, if your review portal is public, this could end up in a long thread of argumentative comments which can then be harmful to your business profile - and you are also highly likely to then lose that client for good. Instead, take the feedback on board, apologise to the customer and offer them something in return for the negative experience. This way, you are keeping the customer happy and hopefully retaining their custom, whilst demonstrating to on-looking clients that you handle negativity well and strive to make improvements in the future. And we know nobody likes a negative review on their website or social media network, however 9 times out of 10 there is at least 1 or 2 poor reviews on every business website you visit, especially if they have reviews within the 1000’s. As we have mentioned, you can’t please absolutely everybody, as there will be always something that doesn’t quite fit someone’s taste. Therefore sometimes a couple of poor reviews actually make your company seem sincere and genuine, as long as you are acknowledging those reviews with an apologetic response.

However, on a very rare occasion, you could receive a review that is threatening, that could be personal to individual staff members and may be verbally abusive. These are the types of feedback in which are an exception to what we have mentioned above. You may need to launch investigations in to those remarks, as to what caused the client to react so aggressively. However, sometimes some of these reviews may be completely out of order, and therefore if you are linked up with a trustworthy review site, you can often appeal to have these removed. In these cases, deleting the review is sometimes the required option.

So how is it you then build back up from those poor reviews and overcome them? (With the exception of the uncommon threatening reviews that we have mentioned above, these should be dealt with in a separate manner)

Once you have responded directly to the customer, showing empathy and apologising, this then often makes the customer re-think their review. For example, if you resolve the problem by offering a small gift or discount on their next purchase or service, this may then prompt the initial poor reviewer to actually come back with a second response accepting your apology. New clients that are browsing your portals want to see positivity, and see any mistakes being resolved quickly, in which your apologetic responses to poor reviews reassure those new clients. Every business receives a complaint over time, sometimes generated from something as simple as the product/service wasn’t quite right for that particular customer. This is what makes a credible business! As your business expands, you are likely to have to deal with further poor feedback in the future. However, as long as you are seen to be empathising with complaining clients, this is okay. It’s like the old saying, if someone has a good experience somewhere, they’ll mention to friends. If someone has a bad experience somewhere, they’ll mention to friends who will then pass this on to other people – like Chinese Whispers. That’s why it’s so important that you use our tips to ensure that you acknowledge criticism and put faith in your clients that you will build solutions to prevent similar events from happening again in the future.

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