Turn A Negative Review Into A Positive One In The Eyes Of Review Readers
A customer may have had a bad experience with your business. Or the customer may have come into a situation with incorrect assumptions. The first thing to do is apologize for the customer having a bad experience. The second is to educate review readers about how they can avoid the “problem”. While never directly stating the customer providing the review was wrong, the idea is to create doubt if the problem was really with your company or the consumer misunderstanding the product or service.
Research from Bazaarvoice has shown that review readers react very positively when a firm uses a negative review to help others avoid the same problem. Let’s take 2 bad experiences and how a restaurant could publicly respond:
Negative Review: A restaurant visitor has food allergies to nuts and claims he or she told the waiter / waitress about them, however, their dish contained nuts.
Response: Apologize and state that you will be doing special training with staff about the importance of food allergies. Then go on to list the different menu items that are normally made with nuts and those that can be made without nuts on request.
Negative Review: A customer claims that they waited 40 minutes to be seated, another 40 minutes to be served, and the food came out cold.
Response: Apologize and let people know that this is not typical. Let people know the typical wait times for different nights for customers walking in without a reservation, and how long it typically takes to get served. Furthermore, let people know that if their food comes out cold, they should immediately tell the manager and the restaurant will re-do the order and take it off the check.
At the same time that you are publicly responding, you should be contacting the customer privately. While offering a new opportunity to try the restaurant compliments of the owner might be good in some situations, this may not always be the right approach. For example, it may be more important to the person with the food allergy to know that the owner takes the issue seriously than a free “lunch”. Inviting the person to attend the food allergy training meeting would send that message.
Bury Negative Reviews By Getting More Positive Ones
(chart from Search Engine Land)
Some negative reviews just cannot be changed into a positive ones. If a potential patron doesn’t see a review, does it exist? Most customers won’t read more than 7 reviews. According to a study
published in Search Engine Land, 78% of customers make up their mind after reading 7 reviews or less. Once you get to the eleventh review, less than 10% of review readers will get that far. In other words, if you can push down a review to the number 8 position, the damage done by a negative review is severely limited.
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