How Not to React to Bad Reviews

Social media can be your best friend, but if not managed properly, it can be a nightmare.  Twitter, and other social media outlets, levels the playing field and gives customers an easier platform to share great stories and also the bad.  Remember the old mantra that for every one good review a person gives they will tell 10 bad reviews, well in the world of 2010, it’s more like ten-fold that!  So the question comes up, how can you use social media for customer reviews?

There is a recent article from Inc.com titled You’ve Been Yelped. To summarize this article a small business owner of a book store had found a bad review on Yelp, and her response was not very nice.  This sparked me to think, how would I respond to negative feedback?

I would first get to the bottom of the problem.  I love negative feedback because it alerts me of things that are wrong.  You don’t like a banner I designed, great I can learn from that and make the banner better.  I recommend to all clients that when you see a bad review on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp to do one of two things.

1. Nip it in the butt.  Respond to the customer and ask specific details about what had occurred.  Ask what it is that they were expecting and what you can do to give them exactly what they wanted or what you can do better in the future.  This will make most people happy and you can turn an angry, disgruntled customer into a great advocate of your product / services.
2. Ignore it.  This may not always be the best avenue, but in some cases it is.  If it is going to just be a losing battle, then ignore it.  In the world we live in, you are just not going to be able to realistically satisfy every customer.

How do you know that people are making bad reviews or comments on your company?  Simple, set up a Google Alert and  use Twitter Search at a bare minimum.  I use TweetDeck to monitor about 5 different keywords.  Every time that word or phrase is mentioned, it will show up in either an e-mail or inside of TweetDeck.  This makes it very easy to see what other people are saying and track your customers’ responses.

One thing that you do not want to do while responding to a bad customer review is be negative back to the customer.  This does not get you anywhere.  Not only does it show that your services may not be great, but your customer service sucks!

What are your customers saying about you?
photo credit: marsmet481 via photopin cc