Every business owner and local SEO professional who manages business listings should know how to respond to negative reviews effectively.
A single bad review does enough to damage a business's reputation on its own, and failing to respond to a bad review or, even worse, replying rudely or in a confrontational manner, will only hurt it more.
Responding to all reviews, the good, the bad, and the ugly, following proper etiquette and best practices is an important part of online reputation management that can even have a positive impact on your local SEO efforts.
So, make sure you understand how to respond to negative reviews on Google and other platforms to minimize their negative impact.
With the right approach, you might even be able to get rid of a negative Google review by getting someone to turn their bad review into a good one!
Why It's Important To Respond To Negative Customer Reviews Professionally
When someone gives a negative review about a business, it's natural to feel defensive, especially if you're the business owner or someone else who's personally invested in the business's success.
But this emotional reaction often leads to unprofessional review responses, which only serve to multiply the negative impact of bad reviews by creating more animosity between the disgruntled customers and the business and hurting public perception among potential future customers.
The reality is that, unless there's something seriously wrong with how a business is operating, most negative reviews stem from an issue that can be easily and professionally resolved through acknowledgement and communication.
Because of this, businesses should look at negative reviews as opportunities to do better. By taking feedback from bad reviews and turning it into positive changes, businesses can nip issues in the bud and get more positive reviews going forward, which both improves their reputation and boosts their rankings in local search results.
In some cases, communicating with an unhappy customer to resolve the issue they had in a polite, professional manner can even shift their opinion of the business enough to turn them into a loyal customer!
How To Respond To Negative Reviews: Best Practices
Now that you understand why responding to negative reviews is important and how it can turn a potentially damaging situation into an opportunity for growth and customer retention, here are a few best practices to follow the next time someone gives a negative review to your business:
- Respond Promptly: Respond to the bad review as soon as possible to show that you value customer feedback and take a proactive approach to resolving issues.
- Stay Professional and Polite: Keep your response calm, respectful, and professional, even if the review is harsh or unfair — getting defensive won't get you anywhere!
- Thank the Customer: Start by thanking the customer for trying your business and taking the time to leave a review and bring an issue to your attention.
- Acknowledge the Issue: Acknowledge the customer's concerns and apologize for their negative experience.
- Take Responsibility: Accept full responsibility for the issue and briefly explain how you plan to address it to prevent it from happening again in the future.
- Offer a Solution: Provide a clear and actionable solution to the problem to make up for the bad experience. This might be a refund, a discount, or an invitation to discuss the issue further offline (you can ask the customer to call or email you to talk personally).
- Keep It Short: Be concise and to the point, covering all the necessary points without making excuses or giving long-winded explanations, which can come off as defensive.
- Follow Up: Once the issue is resolved, follow up with the customer to ensure they are satisfied with the outcome.
- Ask for a New Review: If the issue was successfully resolved and the customer tried your business again and had a good experience, you may politely ask them to update their review or write a new one.
How To Respond To a Negative Review: Example
You should take the time to write a unique response to each negative review to show that you truly read and care about feedback and are committed to improving, but here's a general template to get you started:
Hi [Customer's Name],
Thank you for paying us a visit and taking the time out of your day to leave us your feedback. We apologize for the slow service you experienced during your visit. We take your concerns seriously and are committed to improving our staff's performance to avoid issues like this in the future. Please contact us at [Your Contact Information] so we can further discuss how to resolve this issue to your satisfaction. We would greatly appreciate the opportunity to make this right and show you the quality of service that we strive for!
Best regards,
[Your Name]
What if You Can't Change a Customer's Opinion of Your Business?
While you may be able to improve many customers' perception of your business by following the best practices for responding to negative reviews outlined above, there are likely always going to be a few people who aren't receptive to your efforts to resolve their issues and aren't interested in giving your business another chance to change their mind about it.
In these cases, after you've taken your best shot at rectifying the customer's issue and received no response, the best thing you can do is take the feedback from the negative review and focus on turning it into an opportunity for improvement. This will help you avoid future bad reviews related to the issue and, even better, help you optimize your business to get more good reviews!
It takes time to offset the negative impact of a bad review with good ones, but you can speed up the process by focusing on collecting more reviews from satisfied customers.
Once you're certain that all issues highlighted in bad reviews have been fixed, you can make it easier for happy customers to leave reviews by providing them with direct links to your Google Reviews.
The truth is that satisfied customers are less likely to leave reviews than unsatisfied ones, so making it as easy as possible and reminding them to do so will go a long way towards accelerating the rate at which you collect positive reviews!
How Can You Optimize Responding To Negative Reviews?
In order to ensure you respond to bad reviews in a timely manner, you'll need to continuously monitor your reviews, especially those on Google Business Profile (the most important review platform for local SEO). This allows you to quickly identify and analyze the negative feedback to prepare your response.
However, manually monitoring and analyzing reviews can be quite time consuming, and is something that commonly gets pushed to the side when there are so many other important tasks for businesses to take care of.
Plus, if you're just now starting to address negative feedback on Google Business Profile, you may have a backlog of unresponded-to reviews to get through, making the task even more time consuming.
But, what if we told you there's a tool that can automate your review analysis and even help you come up with responses to bad reviews? Well, it's true!
Local Falcon offers AI-powered review analysis, allowing you to instantly scan hundreds or even thousands of Google Reviews (for you and your top competitors) at once, providing in-depth insights into review sentiment and even helping you come up with the best responses to bad reviews.
How Local Falcon's Reviews Analysis Reports Help You Respond To Bad Reviews
Local Falcon's Reviews Analysis Reports tell you how many reviews on your Business Profile are missing responses, so you can go back and respond to any negative reviews that you may have missed. Keep in mind that you should try to reply to as many positive reviews as possible, too, but make sure to prioritize addressing bad feedback!
These reports also provide highly detailed AI analysis of review sentiment, highlighting the business's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis). They also offer strategic recommendations based on customer feedback on how to improve the customer experience and increase your overall review score to offset any negative reviews and improve your local SEO.
If you're looking for specific advice on how to respond to a bad review, you can scroll down to the "Sample Review Responses" section, which features actual reviews from your Google Business Profile and provides suggested responses. You can copy and paste these responses directly or use them as templates for crafting your own responses, saving you time when it comes to responding to negative reviews!
Businesses and local SEO professionals can schedule recurring review scans to ensure they always have fresh sentiment analysis and don't let any negative feedback fall through the cracks. Remember, every bad review is an opportunity!
Discussing and Responding To Negative Reviews with Falcon Assist
There's one more tool available in Local Falcon that can be of great assistance in responding to bad Google Reviews: Falcon Assist.
This AI-powered local SEO assistant can answer general questions you may have and, more importantly, discuss specific Reviews Analysis Reports with you.
All you have to do is provide Falcon Assist with the URL of the report you want to discuss, then ask it specific questions to help you respond more effectively to negative reviews.
For example, you might ask Falcon Assist something like, "How many negative reviews are missing responses?"
Falcon Assist would then quickly search through the reviews and show you the ones missing responses that could be considered negative (3 stars or less).
After that, you can ask Falcon Assist to provide you with sample responses to specific reviews, drastically reducing the time it takes you to reply to them.
Wrapping Up
Responding to negative reviews is a crucial aspect of online reputation management that can significantly influence a business's success, both in terms of customer perceptions and local SEO.
When you take a proactive approach to responding to reviews and address negative feedback with professionalism and empathy, you can turn potentially damaging situations into opportunities for growth, ultimately helping you collect more positive reviews and improve your rankings in local search results.
By consistently engaging with reviewers, addressing concerns, and making improvements based on feedback, you'll not only enhance your business's performance and reputation, but also boost your local SEO efforts.
Tools like Local Falcon's Reviews Analysis Reports and Falcon Assist can streamline this process, providing valuable insights and helping you craft effective responses in record time.
The bottom line is to view negative reviews as a chance to refine your business and build stronger relationships with your customers, leading to long-term success in your local market!
