[Continued from Part 1]
How to Stay On Top of Negative Reviews and Comments
It’s one thing to say that curating negative reviews is important, but another to actually know how to handle each complaint, tirade, or abusive message that appears on your product pages. Let’s take an in-depth look at the best tactics to stay on top of your negative reviews and know how to strategically respond to each one individually.
– Audit Your Reviews Weekly
How often should you manage your review feeds? The answer to this question is two-fold. First, there’s the risk of letting negative reviews fester and potentially influence future customers. Second is the effort to remain responsive and helpful to your customer base no matter what type of review they leave.
If you have the time and man-power, it’s smart to keep a daily eye on new reviews just in case there are important questions or concerns brought through the review channel that your brand can answer or resolve quickly. This is a great approach to customer service for customers who use reviewing as their way of reaching out for help. You can build some incredible rapport with the customers by responding to concerns hidden even inside positive reviews (ex: “I love this product, but one of the feet was cracked” “Let us send you a replacement foot, thanks for letting us know!”)
However, just for keeping negative reviews under control, weekly auditing is your best schedule. This ensures that negative and abusive reviews don’t have too long to sit, and most people will see weekly maintenance as relatively attentive for a brand.
– Respond to Positive and Negative Reviews with Diplomacy
For each review, make sure that diplomacy is your main strategy. Apologize for any trouble the customer has (even if their complaint is third-party shipping) and offer to help them make the situation right. Always take a diplomatic and friendly tone of voice, speaking for the entire brand when answering reviews. If the review is a complaint, offer to help them make it right. If the review is an abusive tirade, respond by saying that if they have any real concrete complaints, that you’d be happy to provide solutions.
– Offer to Resolve Complaints Through Customer-Service Channels
Some reviewers write one-star negative reviews as a way to hold your brand hostage for freebies. It’s important to keep this in mind before resolving review complaints in the public forum. Always resolve serious complaints through an email or live-chat customer service channel, not on the product review page. Give your first diplomatic response on the review page, then take it somewhere private.
Whether you plan to grant discounts, send a new components pack, or assist with a return-replacement process, it’s important to keep these things behind-the-scenes so as not to encourage the freebie-chasers who think they can get something from spurious one-stars.
Taking customer service requests into a real service channel also makes it safer for customers to share personally-related information about their problems and for you to hold longer conversations about finding a resolution. And if a troll tries to shake you down for freebies and discounts for bogus complaints, you can dismiss them without damaging your public reputation.
– Provide Practical Responses to Abusive or No-Solution Complaints
We’ve given you the tools to handle real complaints and attempts to falsify real complaints. But what do you do when the negative review is just a string of abusive vitriol without any real resolvable problem you can solve? The important thing to understand is that customers know the difference between complaints and pointless insulting statements.
To these, respond with peaceful diplomacy to whatevever content there is to respond to. If the review is just the word “Crap” over and over again, write back that if there’s anything specific they’d like to be resolved, that the company would be happy to help them with the problem. If the review is nothing but curse words and insults, politely ask them to articulate their problem, but there’s no need to be directionlessly offensive.
In fact, responding to abusive reviews with friendly diplomacy and a service-positive attitude can actually build your reputation with future customers who skim the reviews to see how you respond to real problems. your diplomatic response to non-real problems will be an admiral show of attentiveness and willingness to help with problems that are real.
– Take Steps to Have False or Pure-Abuse Reviews Removed
Finally, you’ll need to take steps to have those pointless or blackmailing one-star reviews taken down off the platform. If it’s your own native website, this will be easy to do, provided you are careful to leave real complaints up for validity’s sake. Most platforms like Amazon are willing to listen to appeals and take down any review that is clearly false, vulgar, abusive, or obviously for a completely different product. By removing these reviews from your interface, you restore your star-average and your rate of positive to negative reviews that help customers make smart decisions at a glance.
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If you’re working with a small specialized team, there’s no need to sweat the negative reviews. You don’t need an internal reputation management team to keep on top of negative reviews, stay responsive, and curate your review pages to filter out pure-abuse or trollish reviews. Here at Amazio, we’re dedicated to managing brand reputations amazingly. From your product review pages to your social media community, Amazio can help you stay on top of negative comments, providing customer service when it’s needed and review-curation when the time is right. For more information about having your reviews managed amazingly, contact us today!
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