How to Respond to a Negative Online Review
What to do with such clients? How to communicate with them? How do you react to all these reviews? How to delete and which ones to delete? And in this article I will share with you my experience of dealing with negative reviews. Negativity concerns every business and every specialist. If you sell your products and services online, anyone can leave a negative review about you. We had more than 150 projects, and there were also fakes and negativity. In this post I will share my experience of dealing with negative reviews, objections and tell you how to behave in such a situation. At the end, I will give 5 recommendations and answer all questions related to negativity. My name is Alexander, I am the head of the web studio "Asgard Digital". I agree that a negative review is unpleasant to say the least. You saw it or it was handed to you. You are the owner. You are an expert. Someone responded about you, wrote a petition or a message in Google maps, Yandex maps, on various sites or any other resources. Unpleasant. It hurts your reputation, it hurts your self-esteem, but don’t be upset.
It is important to determine whether this review is true. If this review is not entirely true, then you need to defend your boundaries. I’ll write a little later how I do this. **After reading a negative review, **let’s say you, or my subscribers, or my clients, will already make the wrong choice without communicating with me. Without knowing the whole truth, you will conclude that this company is not worth contacting. After reading the reviews, you will leave me, and therefore you will not become my clients, and I won’t even know about it. Therefore, negative reviews directly affect your income. A negative review is a loss of your customers, an increase in advertising costs about which you may not even know why these advertising budgets are increasing. Therefore, online reputation management is a very important part. In our time of information technology, the information world, it is extremely important to be able to work correctly and respond to negative feedback promptly. I agree that not all people read reviews. Someone saw a product for a service and immediately paid, someone called and immediately ordered because he doesn’t have time to read reviews. But I will say this. 🔥 If a product or service costs 100 rubles conditionally, not everyone will read reviews and delve into the company’s reputation. But if a product costs 200,000 rubles, then people, before giving that kind of money to an unfamiliar company, will think about what kind of company it is, look at its history, study social networks, and read reviews. Therefore, the higher the receipt for your services or goods, the more seriously and responsibly you need to approach working with negative reviews. Over more than 150 projects and over 8 years of work, we had approximately 4-5 negative clients. I call them “negative clients.” These were really difficult situations where we suffered losses, suffered damage, but each client taught me a lot. He strengthened me, he helped my business, helped me build better processes and communications with customers. So thanks to all the negative clients, even if they were flawed. But now, before we take clients on board, my team and I look to see if the client is adequate and whether we can give him the result he wants. *I, as a manager, and my team should enjoy working on customer projects, this is important. * Before signing a contract, we always look to see if there will be any problems with the customer, or if he is a difficult client. Because my studio Asgard Digital and I spend most of our time working and on effective communications with customers. We should enjoy our work, and not just fit into a project for the sake of money and profit. That’s why we take on those clients who we already obviously like, we see the ultimate goal that the client and I can reach together, and this helps us avoid those very moments that I’ll now describe to you here. 🔥 Therefore, my dear friends and subscribers, be prepared for the fact that if you are in business, they may leave negative feedback about you and that’s normal. And now I will give some recommendations on how you can work with such reviews and how to react correctly, how to respond, but in general I will explain why clients write negative comments. First An important rule that I understood is to conduct the project in such a way that at the end you can get a positive video review from the customer about our work. As soon as you start a project with this thought, you are already building a chain of communication of loyalty and friendly relations with the client. Work in such a way that throughout the project the client remains satisfied, and at the end we can ask him for a positive video review. This is the first important rule when starting a project to know that at the end you will need to ask the customer for a video review. Second It is very important to assert boundaries during work, warn and educate the client. Clients do not always know where your or their area of responsibility ends. Using our studio as an example. There are stages in the website creation process, such as prototype, design, layout (many more). When we have drawn the design, we say that if, after agreeing on the design, you decide to make some kind of change (change the color of the button, make an additional block, redraw the background composition), we will not be able to do this. Therefore, it is better to make all the changes now, because later it will be for an additional fee. And the client already understands the responsibility, accepts our work, makes suggestions, and we move on to the next stage. Therefore, explain all points to your clients and always delineate areas of responsibility. Third There were frequent disputes when we did not write everything in writing (all stages of work), but agreed on them over the phone. Somewhere the client may not hear or misunderstand. Accordingly, the cat fight begins. Therefore, take every agreement in writing. Whether it’s WhatsApp correspondence or by mail. But it’s better to email, because correspondence in telegram, contact, and instant messengers can be deleted. Please accept any consent in writing, this will be your document and evidence that you have completed the work, the client has accepted it and there will be no further disputes. Fourth The work must be completed from start to finish. Each block must be agreed upon with the client. We had a situation where we first drew only the computer version of the design to save time, and then at the layout stage we drew the mobile version. And only once in all the time of my practice, the client did not understand and thought that there would be no mobile version. He immediately began to show dissatisfaction, not to us, but in a written review. We discussed all the versions over the phone, and the customer simply did not hear that we were making a mobile version at the end. Now we have restructured our processes and we immediately draw both a version for computers and a version for phones and tablets, coordinating all this in writing with the customer. Fifth It is always necessary to work on mistakes. No one is innocent, both are guilty, but to varying degrees of guilt. If a conflict occurs, if a client leaves a negative review, it means there is an oversight somewhere in your system, there is a bug somewhere, or someone did not complete some process. Somewhere the employee was not trained, etc. It is very important to work on mistakes and not blame everything on the client. Understand why the client left negative feedback. Firstly, this will strengthen you as a specialist and in the future you will no longer have such situations. But perhaps a different situation will arise, and you will again work on the mistakes, correct all the nuances and flaws. Accordingly, in the future you will reduce to a minimum the negativity from your clients. It is important to understand one point. A client who writes you a negative review is the best client. He strengthens your business for free and finds weaknesses, giving you feedback, even if it’s just that. What to do if a client wrote a review on several sites? To delete or not to delete? I will answer this question very simply. First, the content of this review. If the review is truly written to the point, you understand that yes, we made a mistake somewhere. In this case, you need to contact the client and offer him some kind of discount, bonus, or gift. Fix the bug. Offer some kind of promotional code for a future purchase and ask him to delete this review.
Believe me, the client will be happy to meet you halfway, you will fulfill your obligations, moreover, the same client will delete the review and will recommend you. But what to do if the review was not entirely objective? Somewhere distorted, somewhere exaggerated. As a rule, a negative and emotional client can write something that did not happen. I recommend that you do as I do. I contact the client and ask him to explain why he wrote that way, what we did wrong, why he wrote a lie in this review, why he did it. And generally, there are two options. Either the client makes contact or doesn’t. If he makes contact, we take the first strategy. We communicate with him, understand what was wrong, and try to resolve the situation so that he deletes this review. Because it is our reputation, our customers, our income, which directly depends on negative reviews. If the client does not contact us, we respond competently on the same platform on which he posted the review. The official answer. Believe me, people also read the official answer, it is very important to answer as correctly as possible. Do not make excuses without blaming the client. For example: “Thank you Alexey for leaving a review. Indeed, in our studio...” Agreeing is very important. There is a technique called working with the objection: “Yes, BUT” You partially agree with this review, and at the same time you tell the customer: “What in this case you forgot to mention this point, that these works were done. Here you were a little cunning, cheated. Here is the document” Attach some evidence to justify your innocence. As I wrote at the beginning, always assert your boundaries. This is very important. A competent response to a review will neutralize the negative and you, in the person of your future clients who will read the negative review and your response, will even be in the black. After all, any negative review with a competent objection to the customer will in any case be to your benefit. I do not recommend deleting negative reviews. This is not the right thing to eat, it is not environmentally friendly. That's why I'm against this. I don’t even know what the situation should be in order to justify yourself, in order to appear in a better light, that you have no negativity. Against. We are all human, we can all make mistakes, so negative reviews are also good. The question is what and how you respond to these reviews. High conversions to all, if you liked the article, like and subscribe. This is a great motivation for me to write new and useful articles for you.