A Supreme Guide For How To Respond To Negative Reviews 2022

Knowing how to respond to negative reviews will help your business enhance brand awareness, build trust and maintain long-term relationships with potential customers.

This article will highlight some useful tips for how to respond to negative reviews in a professional way and even generate more positive comments. Let’s get started!

10+ Tips How To Respond To Negative Reviews

1. Be patient and show politeness

When experiencing something negative, people tend to lose their patience or try to use aggressive words towards somebody else. However, in the business world where customers are always right, self-restraint and politeness are the keys to effectively respond to negative reviews without turning your conversation into an argument.

When seeing the bad comments at first glance, instead of instantly replying to your customers, as usual, take some time to put yourself in their shoes to understand the situation. What’s more, using semi-formal language when responding to create a sense of courtesy and relaxation is also a small tip to take away.

2. Keep the reply timely and brief

Although most of the customers won’t wait or require a reply to their reviews, it is always better to provide them with a short and coherent response as soon as possible. You can choose to ignore the problems or hide that comment away, but wouldn’t know how the “word of mouth” can severely affect your business, thus even losing more target audience.

When replying quickly and giving short sentences, you make the readers feel that they are important customers to your business. Perhaps it works more effectively than a detailed explanation, and people will take some time reading your reply.

You can start reminding yourself from now on to practice quick reactions and respond to negative reviews on a daily basis. This skill will be extremely useful when it comes to both online reviews and offline communication.

3. Acknowledge customers’ complaint

Nobody wants their business to be broken down only with some complaining comments. Therefore, acknowledging customers’ problems and finding a way to solve them will help maintain a good brand awareness as well as improve your products.

For some unreasonable complaints that you cannot give a solution to them, try to reply with friendliness and show your appreciation will help eliminate the anger in their feelings.

4. Sympathize with the review

“Thank you for choosing our service. We are sorry to hear that…”

The two powerful phrases “Thank you” and “Sorry” are effective in any situation. When it comes to experiencing negative reviews, beginning your reply with those words can release the current stress from your customers, and step by step guide you to respond to negative reviews with sympathy.

As a result, they will feel that they are cared for, and it also raises a higher chance for your business to receive the next feedback about good customer service.

5. Address the issues

Even if you can only introduce a temporary solution to your customers’ complaints, it is always better than to remain silent or ignore one’s problems.

Don’t forget to keep in touch with potential customers to see how you can improve their experience with your products. Accompanying and supporting them in tackling the issues will create a sense of trust as well as turn aggressive customers into loyal prospects.

6. Ask customers for the next review

After figuring out a way and explaining to your customers, perhaps their perspectives about your business have changed a lot. However, the negative reviews still remain on your product page.

You can choose to hide those comments, but it will make the others suspect the stories behind them. Therefore, it would be great if you can ask for another review from your previous customers after long talks with them. If you are sincere and enthusiastic enough to help them, they are also willing to tell you your feelings with a positive attitude. Don’t hesitate to ask them!

7. Offer a gift or a refund 

If the damages detrimentally affect your customers, consider offering a refund or changing the products for them. Losing an amount of money for a specific customer doesn’t mean you are decreasing your profits – the effect may be opposite from what you think.

Also, you can create a refund policy based on the negative reviews. For example, “refund only 50% of the origin price”, or “no refund with some specific cases” are also good ideas to help customers understand the value of your business.

Customers always love gifts and free items. If you cannot give them a refund, offering a gift is also an ideal way to apologize for their bad experience with your products.

8. Personalize the issues

In order to respond to negative reviews in a more authentic way, make your reply personalized to each problem. Instead of launching an automatic tool or copy-pasting a phrase that is frequently used for replying to customers, think about how you can make customers feel that they have a good experience with your business even after complaining.

You can start by omitting “Dear customer” at the beginning of your reply. Instead, using customers’ first names for your response will definitely work wonders. Additionally, you can also restate or summarize customers’ problems and offer help to them.

9. Contact and solve problems together

If the review is related to sophisticated functions or features, you should contact customers by arranging a phone call with them or simply through SNS. It depends on your customers’ preferences in case they want to discuss more with you or provide you a chance to guide them on how to use the products in the right way.

Keep your promise and reassure them that you will keep in touch with them when they’re in trouble experiencing your products. Plus, showing your enthusiasm when helping won’t make them feel that they are bothering you. This is also an opportunity for you to build meaningful and long-term relationships with potential prospects.

10. Identify & Deal with Fake reviews

While launching your business, there are always rivals pretending to write a lot of negative reviews which aim to convince other people to not visit your store anymore. Recognizing those fake and attacking comments as soon as possible will protect your brand awareness as well as maintain trust from your clients.

If customers need an explanation, it is necessary to post an announcement to confirm those negative reviews on your website so that you can calm them down with a good attitude.

What’s next?

After all, learning from mistakes is a process of becoming successful in the future. Therefore, don’t look at the dark side of every problem when you have to respond to negative reviews.

However, practice makes perfect! Imagine how your business can improve by training your customer support team on how to deal with daily problems so that they can respond to negative reviews more professionally.