Four tips on how to handle online customer reviews
In this guest posting, Google’s Kate Conroy offers brands some advice on how to handle online customer reviews.
What to do with a bad review?
Even if your products are spectacular and your service is exemplary, at some point it will happen to you. The Bad Review. Somewhere in the growing world of online feedback will appear something like this:
1 star – Worst experience I have ever had in my life. Do NOT buy from [Insert Your Business]. We waited over 10 minutes to be served, were overcharged by more than $50 apparently due to a ‘software error’ and it took them another 20 minutes to work out the refund. Also the air-con was set to about -57C and we nearly froze to death in the middle of summer. Avoid!
-’Frozen Solid’ of Bondi
Consumer feedback is a valuable thing – in this case the business might re-consider their air-con setting – but every small business has bad days when it gets busy or the cash register dies. When these result in a bad review it can seem a bit unfair – dozens (even thousands) of potential customers are now going to see this record of your worst day ever, permanently displayed on sites with reviews like Google Maps, Eatability, ProductReview.com.au & Rayv. And a bad review will turn customers away in droves. So what do you do?
1. Stay Cool
Remember that you’re replying to feedback about an experience, not about you as a person. Reply in a way that addresses the overall experience, and remember that there’s a real person on the other end. Responding in an abusive way will only encourage them to write more negative reviews about you.
2. Respond, Respond, Respond – publicly
A bad review won’t go away if you ignore it. And trying to convince the customer to take it down often won’t work (they’re entitled to their opinion, after all). The best option is to respond in a calm, professional way. If the issue has affected more than one customer, try to respond publicly as this shows other customers you take feedback seriously. Sites that allow businesses to respond to reviews include Google Maps (for reviews by Google users) and Urbanspoon.
3. Remember who your audience is
It would be great if you could always contact the upset customer, shower them with apologies & roses and have them re-cant their review, but this isn’t always practical. You may not know how to contact them, roses cost money (that you need to fix the cash register!), and a really upset customer may refuse to change their opinion. A simple apology often goes a long, long way, but never forget that your main audience is the future customers who are reading the review. The explanation of how you fixed the problem should be directed here – and the best place to put it (wherever possible) is right next to the original review, like this:
Dear Frozen Solid,
Sorry to hear about your poor experience in our store. We just wanted to apologise for the trouble and let you know we’ve made changes based on your feedback to make sure it doesn’t happen again, including:
– opening 30 mins earlier on Mondays to prevent long queues in the morning
– upgrading our cash register software
– training staff on how to process refunds more quickly, and
– setting our air-con to a more comfortable 24C in summer (thanks for the tip!)
Simply the fact that you (a) read your reviews (b) care what people think and (c) responded is often enough to negate a bad review, especially if most of your other reviews are positive.
4. Respond to your positive reviews as well
The most underutilised feature of many review sites is the option to respond to a review – because most businesses never use it until they have a bad review, when the real value lies in being able to respond to a positive review, like this:
4 stars – Only place to get a decent cup of coffee in this neighbourhood, would die without this place – also like that they use fair trade coffee.
Caffeine Junkie of Randwick
Dear Caffeine Junkie
Great to hear we’re keeping you awake (and alive) with our coffee. We love Fair Trade coffee too! You’ll be pleased to know that in March we’re taking part in Fair Trade Week and will have a different single-origin Fair Trade coffee to try every day (as well as our trusty regular brew). Hope to see you then.
Suddenly you’ve doubled the screen-space devoted to putting your business in a good light, you’ve formed a bond with one of your best customers and you’ve had a chance to promote your upcoming event – all for free, and in under 5 minutes.
So when (not if) a bad review happens to you, stay cool and respond professionally – it only takes a few minutes and will actually enhance your online reputation.
- Kate Conroy is an SMB expert and AdWords product specialist at Google Australia
Linkedin
lol at the concept of google giving customer service advice.
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@Logic – But good advice
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Kate,
Can you explain why Google is storing reviews and not sending the traffic to your content partners who 1) have reviews and 2) provided you with all the local content in the first place.
Thanks.
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@ Logic
Totally agree – I’d assumed Kate would have advised us to respond with the following:
“Your review has been placed into our company’s verification progress. The standard turnaround for this process is 4-6 weeks. There is no way of escalating it.
In the meantime please familiarise yourself with our quality guidelines – playing by our rules will minimise our enormous waiting periods.”
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Customer reviews matter a lot regardless of their sentiment. Not only to savvy consumers, who trust them more than advertisers or expert reviewers, but also to manufacturers, who use the Word of Mouth analysis for planning their product updates. Online retailers knew for a while that availability of representative number of customer reviews, created uplift in sales. Our company (Amplified Analytics) is focusing on aggregation and contextual analysis of the customer reviews to enable our business customers to “hear” clear signals of what is important to their customers and how important it is to them. In other words we quantify qualitative information to enable better product design and marketing.
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Great article Kate
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Kate,
What would you advise Vodafone to do this week with it’s Facebook page?
The CEO already apologised and it only seems to have ramped up the complaints:
http://www.facebook.com/vodafoneau
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In the world of affiliates (not something often seen here on Mumbrella!) we often get calls from horrified clients where their credit card/site/customer service has had a horrible review, and to make sure that we don’t have that site advertising the client’s products any more.
I generally take the tack, that it’s better for the customer to be given the option to visit the client site and get the client side of the story, but also, if the site is being rewarded for advertising the client, then they are more likely to do things that paint the product in a favourable light.
Eg, 2 credit cards on a site, one the site is rewarded for advertising, the other not. (There are journalistic integrity issues here, sure). Credit card 1. “You get reward points but it’s really not worth the $150 annual fee”. Credit card 2. “It’s worth considering if you spend enough money to make the reward points worth the $150 fee”.
If the site has some advertising/commercial relationship (obviously should be disclosed) then they do at least have some incentive to remove the *really* nasty/libellous comments or reviews, or to paint them in a fair light. Keep your enemies close, and all that…
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@ Concerned Content Partner
Google pulls review snippets from multiple sources (like Eatability, Urbanspoon & Trip Advisor) into Google Places because we think it provides a pretty good user experience when you are searching on Maps, but we don’t show the whole review. In each instance, a link to the originating site with the total number of reviews is shown, and only a short snippet of one or two of the reviews is displayed. Because the reviews aren’t complete and you can see there is a lot more of them, it encourages users to go through and read more, similar to how the snippets of text you see from web pages in a Google Search result encourage users to click on what looks most useful.
For example, try searching for any major hotel in Sydney on Google Maps and you should find some incomplete review snippets from Trip Advisor, Booking.com etc, and it will also tell you that there are (usually) several hundred reviews to read, but you need to click through to the review supplier to see the full review we’ve taken the snippet from, or to read the hundreds of other reviews. This sends traffic through to the suppliers.
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@Kate – Their are several big problems with the review data found in the Australian market place, Check out this huge errors I have found with a huge term –
http://jamesnorquay.com/massiv.....s-reviews/
Forums which are taking snippets for the wrong locations are been shown for specific business addresses.
Google places is a huge area of concern for many clients it can mean the difference for a gain or a loss in business and having technology which is not 100% accurate does not work well for customers imo.
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I love this once size fits all article when it comes to dealing with feedback. How very typical of Google.
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@The Accountant
I don’t know about you, but I’d like to get home in time for Christmas. I suspect an article listing every possible complaint every Australian company may encounter, and then listing each solution individually might take a long long time to read
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@ Kate, this is good advice and from what I can see, a growing issue.
It’s all well and good to have tens of thousands of fans interacting with your social media, but when things go bad, the results can be catastrophic.
I’ve been watching with interest a phenomenal backlash against an Australian company and their Managing Director in the past fortnight and it shows just how quickly a brand’s online presence can be damaged.
It went worldwide when posted on car enthusiast forum Jalopnik and has simply continued to spread from there.
Here is the link to the article for those interested. http://jalopnik.com/5713816/ho.....lice-visit
It certainly highlights the need for careful consideration when dealing with your brand in an online environment.
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But bad reviews can help your Google ranking, can’t they?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11.....orker.html
From the New York Times:
“Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.”
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bing lee $1 facebook like page is a fail for qld floods and also cudo. gready bastards….
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Great article Kate. I’d also suggest encouraging customers to give you feedback and review you publically. Each positive review you get offsets any past or future negative reviews. (1 bad review out of 2 looks doesn’t look too good, but 1 out of 20 is quite understandable and shows the business in a really good light.)
If or when you do get negative reviews, view it as a blessing. The review didn’t change the service or the customer’s sentiment – it just means that now you know about a problem you can address.
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