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How to Respond to a Negative Review of Your Local Business
By Sarah Giometti | Business
By Sarah Giometti | Business
Hey, everyone. I’m Sarah Giometti, the founder of Provaro Marketing. In this video, I want to talk about how to respond to negative business reviews. I know they suck. Nobody wants to get a negative review. We all think that we do a really great job, make our customers and clients happy, but in reality as a business owner, you just can’t please everyone and negative reviews are bound to happen.
So we have a few steps on what to do. Number one, don’t panic. Don’t read it at 10:00 at night and instantly try to respond and defend yourself. It’s the nature of the business and it’s not the end of the world to get a negative review. So first, you want to not panic, calm down. Second, you want to start to construct your response and you put a few elements in there. First, apologize. It does not matter if they are right or wrong, it’s public, it’s their impression of what happened, so they are right. You need to apologize, say, “I’m so sorry you had this experience, I want to make it right.”
Second, offer a solution. Do not offer up excuses because honestly, they don’t care and it just makes you look desperate and defensive. So you just want to offer up a solution. If you’re a local restaurant and somebody had bad service, you say, “I’m so sorry you had a bad experience, I’d like to invite you back into the restaurant on our dime so that we can try to give you a better experience.” Is it worth the extra $50, $100, whatever, to bring them back in and offer them a free dinner in order to get them to flip their opinion of you? Because if they had an awful experience, they’re going to tell their friends. But if you make it right and they come back in and have a great experience, they’re going to tell all their friends who are going to be like, “Wow, they really care about their customers and fixed it.”
Finally, say thank you. Thank them for giving you the review. Even if it’s negative. It shows other people that you care about the customers publicly. It also shows that you’re listening and you’re paying attention and you appreciate the feedback, so that you can go and make corrections in your business and whatever went wrong with this customer.
The few steps to recap are: Don’t panic, take your time to construct your response and do it not out of anger; second, apologize; third, offer a solution not excuses; and fourth, finally, thank them for taking the time to give you feedback in the review so that you can correct whatever went wrong. I hope this helps you in figuring out how to respond to a negative review. And if you like the content in this video or other videos on our channel, really appreciate you clicking the subscribe button down below, and I’ll see you in the next video.
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