Article Contributed by Mark Chandley
Reputation is one of the most important assets your business owns. A disgruntled customer being vocal is the last thing you need to deal with. Negative reviews can show up in the search engines and affect your ratings. Developing a system to handle these situations, and they will occur, will help reduce the affect negative reviews can have on your clients and potential clients.
Tips For Handling A Bad Review
Build your online presence. Build your brand with your web site. Having a professional web site built and maintained, will help to brand you and your business, and convey to customers and prospects your competitive value in the marketplace. Visibility on the web is vital today in reaching new customers, as well as maintaining existing customers by branding yourself to set your business apart from the others.
Utilize Your Loyal Customers
Focus on your loyal customer base. When you receive a negative review, burry it. Contacting your good clients, those who will be willing to help you, and having them go online and submit good positive reviews, can do that. This is where you need a good system and working with the person who maintains your web site can be helpful in establishing one for your business. Before long, the good reviews will bury the bad ones and when someone does a search, they will usually only look at the first page or two and then move on.
You Can’t Please All The People All The Time
Bad reviews will probably happen. Know that sooner or later, if you are in business long enough, you are bound to have that one customer, that no matter what you do, will never be pleased. Creating a system is the key to success. When you plan ahead of time, how to handle situations as they come up, you will achieve better results in dismantling problems. Have a strategy in place to handle bad reviews, and handle them. Respond to your customers directly, not online. You may email, phone, or send a letter to them and immediately. Let them know you would like to rectify their bad experience and ask what you can do to make it better. This should apply whether they have submitted a negative review on line, or just discussed verbally their dissatisfaction. Never confront them publically, always keep their problems private. If the issue cannot be solved, and sometimes it can’t, monitor the online review to make sure it doesn’t show up there. If it does, go back to your plan you set up for dealing with getting new positive reviews to flood and bury the negative ones.
Keep A Watchful Eye.
Be on the lookout for negative reviews. When they happen, have your plan ready to get new reviews from your loyal customers, and bury the bad reviews. Maintain a good web presence to promote your good image and you can over come when a disgruntled customer shows up.
About the Author
Guest blog written by Mark Chandley, President of Adeptiv Soultions, an order fulfillment and ecommerce fulfillment company based in New York.