How to Respond to Positive & Negative Reviews

Without a doubt, online reviews are one of the single most important tools you can utilize for your business. With review sites like BBB, Google and Facebook within everyone’s fingertips, consumers often use these to share their personal experience with a company. And although anyone can leave a review about his or her experience, people tend to write reviews if they had either a really great experience or a horrible one.

Therefore, it’s important to know how to properly respond to all types of reviews to make your response effective. Here’s how you can respond to both negative and positive customer reviews.

1. Recognize the Complaint

When a negative review of your business pops up online, don’t panic. Instead, remember that you can use this review to your advantage. No matter what the mistake was (or even if the customer is unreasonably disgruntled), immediately respond with an apology for the customer’s unhappiness. Many people just want their voice to be heard by someone, so reaching out to them online to apologize for the poor experience can immediately change their opinion of your business.

2. Offer a Solution

Depending on the situation, offer to do what you can to fix the problem. That might mean going out of your way to follow up on the service or simply telling them you will work to fix the problem in the future. Even if you are not able to change something, offering to make up for it goes a long way in the world of customer service. If you can get back into your customer’s good graces after a negative review, you’ve provided excellent customer service.

3. Make it Public

Another key to responding to online reviews is to make sure others can read your response. Whether it’s Houzz, Google or Facebook, it’s important to post your response under their review rather than emailing or messaging them separately. This way, other consumers reading your review will see that you made an effort to resolve the issue, something they can’t see if the comment is not public. They’ll know you’re committed to customer satisfaction, which will make them more likely to contact you.

1. Regularly Check Your Reviews

In order to respond to all positive reviews in a timely manner, you need to be aware of where those reviews are coming from. Start by keeping a list of all the places your business has reviews, which could include Google, BBB, Houzz, Facebook or any other similar sites, and regularly check for new posts. As soon as you see a new review, you should post a response as immediately as possible.

2. Say Thank You

If someone is willing to take the time to post a positive review about your service, he or she clearly wants people to know about the excellent service you provided. This takes time and effort on their end, which you should always show your appreciation for.

Always reach out and post a response to positive reviews, making it as personal as possible. A generic response is better than no response, but the more details you can include, the more potential customers will see that you really care about your clients. Most importantly, make sure to say ‘thank you!’

3. Use Your Comment as a Free Advertisement

When you respond to a positive comment, you have the opportunity to let loyal customers know about upcoming deals and specials you have. For example, a house painting company could respond to a positive review like this:

Even if this particular customer doesn’t take you up on your offer, you’re still letting other visitors know about a special you are running, which could motivate them to contact you for your services.

4. Display Positive Reviews on Your Website

All these positive reviews and your efforts to respond are useless if the right people can’t see them. You want potential customers to have access to these positive reviews when they are looking at your business, so what better place to display themthan directly on your website?

Incorporating an online review builder like Locallogy’s will pull only 4- and 5-star reviews from the Internet and show them on your website’s testimonial section. This allows businesses to easily ask customers to leave a review, and then funnel these positive reviews onto your website. Plus, your star ratings show up next in your search results, helping you stand out against competitors.

The bottom line is that all reviews, good and bad, matter to your business. Even one or two bad-to-ok reviews aren’t horrible because they make other online reviews seem more credible (as opposed to having all 5-star reviews, which many people find suspicious ).

No matter what your reviews say, you should always make sure you respond to them in a strategic way. If done correctly, this can drastically change how potential clients view your business.