Dealing with Online Complaints

No one wants to read a bad review about their business online. Whether it’s posted on Google with your search engine results, or listed on Yelp or Angie’s List, a bad review can sway other potential customers away from your business. Worse yet, you may not even know it.
There are several ways you can deal with a bad review and, for the sake of this article, we will talk about the typical bad review – not the competitor or slightly crazy customer who is out there slamming you repeatedly. That happens, of course, but it is not the norm.
First, remember that a bad review is no different than when a customer comes up to you or a manager at your brick-and-mortar business and complains. Savvy business people understand that a complaint is really an opportunity. Why? Because that customer actually wants to keep doing business with you. After all, she took the time to complain and her hope is that you will do something to fix the situation or, at least, take the complaint seriously and look into it. That’s just good, basic customer service and furthermore, it can be helpful by surfacing an issue you didn’t know about.
Online complaints, sometimes in the form of bad reviews, are also an opportunity. Many companies are spending a lot of time and resources to listen online and pick up on unhappy customers. They monitor Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and other places online and when someone mentions their business, they respond immediately. Some of the best are the financial institutions like Wells Fargo and Bank of America. They have a team of people assigned to do the listening every day. And when a complaint surfaces, the team quickly responds and invites the customer to go offline and discuss the issue. So how can you adapt this strategy to your business? First, set up a listening post. Google allows you to set up alerts that will sniff around the internet for mentions of your name, then deliver a link via Email to anything that comes up. Facebook and Twitter allow you to search their sites for mentions of your business, and Yelp allows you to search, too. I recommend searching each of those sites at least weekly until you get a feel for how often people are posting about your business. If it is rare, then you can drop back to monthly searches. But set up your Google alert to deliver daily results anyway.
Next, respond to these posts, but do it as tactfully and positively as you would if the person was standing right in front of you. What you post on the internet never goes away, and if you post a rant in response to a customer complaint, it will be taken negatively by everyone who sees it. Look at these complaints as a chance to do some service recovery while at the same time making a positive impression on everyone else who reads it. Wouldn’t you be far more likely to visit a business that actively tried to resolve a customer complaint, than one that responded curtly or even rudely? Remember, one negative comment online is just one negative comment. Don’t go overboard trying to justify what a wonderful business you are. People have bad days, and things do go wrong in business. One bad review is not a crisis. However, it is worth looking into because these comments can serve as a wonderful early warning system for you, the business owner. If you have an employee who is not always courteous, then knowing that sooner is better than later. These complaints are an opportunity for the business owner to look into the issue and determine if there really is a problem, or not.
Online reviews can also be positive, and it is those you want to promote and elicit. Invite your customers to post reviews of your business online and tell them how to do that. Re-post or retweet posts that are positive. Respond quickly to those that are not so great, and try to resolve them. Above all, don’t ignore them. Your customers are seeing them and taking that feedback into consideration in their decision-making process. Make sure you know what is being said about you out there.
Kim Deppe, APR – President, Deppe Communications.Deppe Communications provides marketing strategy and outsourced marketing servicesfor small and medium sized businesses. Services include social media marketing, SEO, marketing planning, advertising, copywriting, and more.