It will happen to every business owner at some point: you’ll get a bad review. Regardless of how hard you’re working to make everything just right, sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes your customer is just having a bad day.
Good News! Reputation Builder's Feedback First System reduces negative reviews dramatically!
Here is How It Works (Simple Flow Chart)
Here is How It Works (Detailed low Chart)
Stats show that even one bad review can take 12 positive ones to counter it in the minds of potential customers online. In fact, just one bad review can cost you up to 30 new customers! That’s because 88 percent of people give weight to online reviews to make purchasing decisions—and 80 percent of those folks will shop elsewhere if they see a bad review that isn’t countered by a hefty collection of positive ones.
Online reviews are so much more powerful than old-fashioned word of mouth. While neighborhood gossip was powerful in its day, online reviews are like neighborhood gossip on steroids x 1000 – on a global scale. That’s because once a review is posted, whether on social media somewhere, on a review site, it stays out there forever—constantly being dug up by Google or Bing, constantly being shared somewhere by someone… for all kinds of reasons. And that can damage your business for a long, long time if you don’t have any way to counter it effectively.
So: how to stop getting bad reviews? It’s the essential question of the day and it requires an understanding of some basic principles. But fortunately, there are good ways how to handle bad reviews so they don’t damage your business – and could actually help you out in the long run.
Why Do People Post Bad Reviews?
Any number of problems can spur a grumpy client on to write a negative review, so you need to learn how to handle bad reviews the right way. And it’s essential to understand why people post them so that you can act fast to resolve the concerns that led to the bad review in the first place.
First, let’s look at what the research shows. The most common reasons for a bad review include:
- 70% of unhappy review writers just want you to respond to their complaint. What’s shocking is that only 38% of those unhappy customers report ever receiving a reply! (Hidden message: always respond if you want to stop bad reviews cold!)
- 23% of unhappy reviewers are genuinely twisted around the axel and want to get revenge. This may not even be a logical response to what happened, but you need to be aware of it.
- 90 percent of customers who write reviews—positive or negative—just want to help other people make smarter purchasing decisions.
There is also a small percentage of online review writers who may never even have visited your business—they just get their jollies by harassing, bullying and denigrating others for no apparent reason.
There are specific steps you can take to dealing with almost all of these issues. Let’s talk about 3 essential things you can do to stop bad reviews from ruining your business now:
1. Stop Bad Reviews from Going Public with Internal Feedback First
Get right down to brass tacks by asking all of your customers for internal feedback first. The Reputation Builder system makes this process easy as pie. And it is so important! First of all, by asking each customer for internal feedback, you give them an immediate chance to a) vent and b) let you solve their problem quickly.
Reputation Builder empowers you to use this proactive feedback collection method automatically, during each transaction, while feelings and impressions are fresh. Instead of letting an unhappy customer go home and stew about a bad experience until they’re bursting to complain all over Instagram, you can deal with that unhappiness immediately. Fix the problem. Make it better now.
If you go out of your way to make sure that unhappy customer feels better and has their problem resolved immediately, you’ve more than likely just won a raving fan who will, instead, post to all 578 of their friends and family about how awesomely you handled their issue.
What’s great about Reputation Builder is that it also gives you a chance, right away, to collect positive feedback. You can collect it right in the store with Feedback First and you can also use any one of several automatic emails that your customer can respond to as well. Either way, you can collect so many more positive reviews that they can drown out the occasional cranky one more easily.
By making collecting positive feedback automatic and dealing with unhappy customers quicker, it saves you hours and hours of time trying to figure out a way to do either of those things manually. There are so many benefits that Reputation Builder brings to business owners, we can’t list them all in this blog. So, we listed a few more here: 20 benefits of Reputation Builder.
2. How to Handle Bad Reviews if You Don’t Catch Them In-Store
Just looking at the statistic above, you can help at least 70 percent of your unhappy customers just by responding quickly to their needs! But your response needs to be the right one if it’s going to turn them from grumpy to happy. So:
These steps help you provide the excellent customer service that can turn a negative experience into a positive one for your customer. When you do this, you can use Reputation Builder to capture their great experience and add it to your growing collection of positive reviews automatically.
3. How to Stop Getting Bad Reviews: Crazy Good Service in the First Place
Delighting your customers is really the biggest way to stop bad reviews from happening in the first place. When you provide amazing, over-the-top fabulous customer service, customers notice. It’s not run-of-the-mill, it’s extraordinary. Communicate with your customers often—work on building a positive relationship with them by learning their names, their needs and how you can make their lives better.
And customers will notice this kind of customer service and be willing to talk about it. Use Reputation Builder to capture those amazing 5-star experiences so everyone can benefit from them.
Reputation Builder makes this process easy and saves you so much time by:
- Automatically capturing customers’ names and email addresses
- Providing an in-store moment to provide feedback and reviews
- Sending automatic emails and reminders on your behalf
If you consistently get feedback that is in the 9 to 10 range, you’re golden. Reputation builder takes care of the rest by sending customers your Facebook, Google+, etc. pages so they can quickly and easily post a happy review.
NOTE: If they give feedback at a 7 or below, the customer receives an automatic apology email to them and alerts you so that you can immediately call the customer to fix their problem. (Look at the following screen shot for an example of this email.)
If you’re ever in that situation, you can see how Reputation Builder…
- Prevents a negative review from leaking out before you get a chance to make it right
- Gives you a chance to improve things for your customer
- Saves you loads of time trying to track down the source of a problem.
- Hands you a new opportunity to delight a customer and turn the whole situation into a positive experience (and a 5-star review) for you both.
Stop Negative Reviews Before They Happen
Now that you know how to stop getting bad reviews, you can avoid all of the pitfalls they can create. In fact, there are at least 4 ways that bad reviews can drain your bottom line that you can avoid by using Reputation Builder.
Order Reputation Builder today and start shoring up your happy review collection and stop bad reviews from happening in the first place today!