Negative reviews happen to everyone. Even brands with flawless products and superb customer service get the occasional negative review. Some negative reviews are constructive or genuine requests for customer support. Some are blatant attempts to get freebies and discounts. Some are internet trolls just trying to do damage. No matter how dedicated you are to customer satisfaction, don’t be surprised when the occasional negative review rolls onto your page.
While it’s important to know when to not engage with an abusive complaint, it is also vital that every brand manage and curate their negative reviews to maintain your reputation and to properly serve customers with real complaints. Today, we’re here to offer a comprehensive crash-course in how to combat negative reviews online and control the conversation on your company and product pages.
Why Managing Negative Reviews Matter
Managing negative reviews is one of the most important and underrated tasks for your brand reputation. Negative reviews on your page bring down your overall rating and look bad to new customers who have no idea what the context of those reviews might be. If you want your brand and products to maintain a positive and hard-earned reputation and to give new customers an informative idea of what they can expect, you need to curate those negative reviews and [revent false negatives from impacting the conversation about your brand.
Every brand needs to put time and effort into curating reviews, both positive and negative. This ensures that you know what is being said about your products and that you are using reviews as another channel to provide answers and customer service when needed.
The Impact of Un-Managed Negative Reviews
Failing to curate your negative reviews is big mistake for any online brand. To customers, previous customer’s opinion of your brand matters more than all the promotional material and informative images your brand can generate. This can cause seriously destructive consequences for your brand reputation and product trustworthiness in a number of ways. It’s vital that you are aware of the potential impact of negative customer reviews so that you know how to approach each review individually based on customer need and how it can affect your online reputation.
– Make Your Products Appear Low-Quality
Unmanaged negative reviews can lower your star-rating, clutter your product pages, and make it seem like your products are low-quality when they are really not.
– Damage Your Brand Reputation
Negative reviews can damage your brand reputation in a number of ways. The reviews may claim that your service was no-good when the reviewer did not reach out for service. They can make it seem like many of your products (not just one) are untrustworthy and low-quality. And negative reviews sometimes blame your brand for mistakes outside of your control, as with third-party platform or shipping problems.
– Make Your Brand Look Inattentive
Failing to curate or address clearly wrong or abusive negative reviews can also make your brand seem inattentive, as if you don’t care about customer opinions, responses, and reviews no matter what they say. Customers are discouraged by the idea of a brand that would not respond if they gave a negative review with genuine problems you could solve.
– Confuse and Discourage New Customers
Lastly, negative reviews give new customers the wrong impression of your brand and products. Someone trying to make a smart decision about the best products in a large market may accidentally buy something lower-quality than your products because a negative review skewed their ability to tell the difference. A single passionate negative review can also act as a turn-off, making customers think that your products are inconsistent in quality and they’re not willing to take the risk.
[Continued in Part 2
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