Customer Reviews and why you shouldn’t be scared of bad ones

Receiving a bad review online isn’t exactly welcomed, but it does present you with a great opportunity to show your personality off. Let’s face it, we all make mistakes from time to time. Our deliveries aren’t always 100% on time, one of our team might not give the service we expect. But it’s how you deal with these problems that can help improve your reputation.

Whilst we are getting more and more used to leaving reviews, many of us are still compelled to do so only when we have a very good or very bad experience. The majority of interactions with your company will probably sit somewhere in the middle which means you may lose out on the potential visibility of those customers leaving their feedback.

How to deal with a bad review

Here are our top tips for dealing with a bad review:

• Whatever you do don’t delete or ignore it
• Respond quickly
• Don’t try and negate responsibility or blame your customer
• Always apologise for the fact that someone hasn’t had the experience they expected
• Try to publicly deal with their issue, if it would mean revealing private information ask them to email you and make sure you deal with that email straight away
• Whether you agree with someone or not, always thank them for their feedback

Most people recognise that businesses are run by real people and are on the whole understanding when things go wrong. As long as you are honest and try your best to help resolve the situation then there is nothing more you can do. A company that is seen to interact with their customers online will help improve their reputation and can potentially turn a bad review into a positive!

But how do you encourage good reviews

Firstly, by interacting with your customer’s online people will be more likely to leave their feedback because they can see that you take it on board, but here is a short list of ways you can help encourage your customers to leave you a review.

• Send them an email a few days after they have received their purchase with a link back to the place you want them to leave a review. Make it as easy as possible.
• Add an image/button on all of your marketing material that says “leave us a review”
• Make it clear that you value any feedback and that your customer’s opinion is important
• Showcase case studies if relevant, to show how you have taken customers feedback into account. Is there a process you have changed as a result? Have you stocked more sizes in a particular product? That kind of thing.

Don’t hassle people though or they will very quickly turn off from your brand. Getting a gazillion emails asking to leave a review is bad practise. If someone doesn’t want to then they aren’t going to, no matter how many times you ask them.

Lastly and most importantly, never never ever fake it. Paying for reviews is a big no no and to be honest they stand out a mile!