How to Handle Bad Online Reviews

A full 90 percent of customers say their purchases are influenced by online reviews. And increasingly, consumers are turning to online reviews to determine where they choose to shop.

Your shop’s online reviews also help determine how prominently Google ranks your store in its search results.

According to MOZ, online reviews make up about 10 percent of how Google calculates your search engine ranking, writes Shopify.

But most importantly, consumers want to see that a store does a good job and cares about its customers.  So what do you do when your shop gets a bad review on Google, Yelp, FourSquare, etc?

Internet Fellas‘ Michael Watson says the most important thing is to respond quickly.  The worst thing you can do is not respond at all. He proposes something like this, “I’m sorry you had a bad experience. It’s our goal to make sure every one of our customers happy. Please contact us at xxx-xxx-xxxx and we’ll try to rectify the problem.”

“You don’t have to get defensive or address it in detail,” said Watson. “The main thing is to engage. The worst thing you can do is not engage and leave it sitting there.”

He cited this example from Ocala Car Audio in FL as a proper response:

Your response shouldn’t go to the other extreme either. You don’t want to be overly apologetic and promise free goods or steep discounts.  If other consumers see that you’ll give away free products, they may take advantage.

Consumers can change their reviews. So by encouraging a reviewer to contact you, perhaps you can fix the problem.  He may or may not change his review in response.

Parish Tanner of Ocala Car Audio, said, “There’s been times I had to give away something, and if we legitimately screwed up, I’ll do what I have to do.  I had one customer, she bought a cheap radio from us.  We went through 3 or 4 options and she chose the cheaper one. And then she went home and saw it didn’t have this feature and got on Yelp and started bashing us.  I wound up giving her the better radio for free and she didn’t go back and fix the review.”  But in another case someone from out of town had a problem with a dash kit that cost $50. “I wrote him a check and mailed it and he updated his review for us.”

If you have dozens of reviews, people expect some bad reviews.  But you can ask Google, and others to remove them.  Watson said one client he worked for repeatedly invited a customer to contact him so he could try to fix the problem.  The customer kept posting angry comments.  But in that case, Google removed the review upon request.

Watson says the first thing to do is sign in to Yelp or Google and make sure you own your account.  Then you can respond to reviews, post pictures and apply to have a bad review removed. These are free accounts that are sometimes put up by Google or Yelp, so make sure you are registered as the owner.

Another tip is to ask customers for a review.  When you return a car to a customer who seemed happy with your store, ask him for a review.  “A lot of [store owners] have a macho attitude or they think I’m not supposed to ask for an email address or a review. You can have a card printed up that says “Did you like your service?”  Then it tells people where to go to write a review,” said Watson.

Here’s a handout generator recommended by Shopify for creating a sheet to ask for reviews.

Here’s what Yelp  and LinkedIn say about handling reviews.

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