How to handle a bad online review

Most negative reviews are taken personally, doing this can make you lose focus on pleasing all customers and only focusing on being angry with the one who is unpleased. Constructive criticism is very different from a bad review and taking constructive criticism is a way that your business can grow. Using different things that the consumer thinks would be a good idea is very smart and good for both sides of the business. Business owners who take constructive criticism or bad reviews poorly should have a certain employee in charge of responding to the reviews but there are many tricks to make responding and receiving a smoother process.

1. Responding in a professional manner will make the confrontation seem as though the commenter is just someone who is trying to make the business look bad. The only thing you can control is the next comment back to the person so make sure it is something that wouldn’t make the other person even more upset and fixes the problem.
2. Taking the confrontation to a personal contact by either calling them or giving them your email, will let the issue be dealt without the eye of the public. Talking in private will also allow for no outside comments to be added making the issue handled faster.
3. Getting the issue taken care of as fast as possible and responding fast will make the customer happy and more likely to either take down the review or reply to their own comment and say how pleased they were with the customer service. Having the customer want to come back and continue to purchase the product is a great way to make your business thrive and grow.
4. Encouraging reviews is a great way to make things in your business better, telling the customer to give constructive criticism will make the person that is planning on writing a bad review feel bad because you want to improve parts of your business. Admitting that a product could be better will let the customer know that they should help to make it better than talking bad about it.
5. Having a private website service to remove bad reviews from your site is also an option, but this could create more problems and make commenters even more upset when they look and their comment has been erased from the site. Spending money on something that can be handled by reasoning is also something that doesn’t need to be done.