KHOU Channel 11 Houston Features Paul Sherland in Story About Bad Customer Reviews
Call IX Brand SEO Services at 281-343-3284 for help in responding to bad customer reviews and a program to collect great customer reviews.
KHOU Reporter Andrew Horansky recently did an outstanding story on businesses responding to bad customer reviews, and he invited Paul Sherland of IX Brand SEO Services to provide comments. Also contributing were several local business owners and a Houston lawyer specializing in online issues. Here’s a link to the story.
Just about every type of business will eventually get a bad customer review online. You can’t please everyone and it doesn’t make good business sense to try. However, if you’ve been running a great business with lots of happy customers, one or two bad online reviews won’t be a disaster because you’ll have a history of good reviews for your business online. Those couple of bad reviews will just add credibility to the many great reviews already posted for your business and potential customers reading the reviews will know that they’re not being filtered for positive comments only. That’s why a consistent program to gather great customer reviews for your business will provide you with “reputation insurance” against being hurt by the occasional bad review.
Here’s what you should think about if you get bad customer reviews.
- Check the web for more negative reviews. An angry reviewer will often visit several websites to leave negative comments. You should start with this damage survey.
- Is the reviewer someone you can reason with to salvage your relationship? If so, this should be your first step because the reviewer can modify or even remove the review. If you can make a reasonable accommodation to satisfy the reviewer, this might result in the review being removed completely and perhaps you might even get a positive review.
- If you don’t know who wrote the review or if the reviewer is unreasonable, then check the terms of service or the user guidelines for website hosting the review to see if the review might possibly violate those rules. If the review does violate the website’s rules, submit a request to the website to have the review removed.
- Leave a reasonable, professional response to the review outlining what you did to satisfy the customer and say you’re sorry if appropriate. Don’t try to inflame the situation by threatening to sue or name calling.
- Use this as motivation to start a business process to collect positive reviews from your customers. If you do, you’ll be establishing protection against any future negative reviews and mitigating the impact of any negative reviews you’ve already collected.
- If your business is being damaged by a negative review and the review is untrue, you may want to see a lawyer to discuss legal action. Legal action costs money and often brings additional negative publicity to a business, but it might be necessary sometimes.
What Have You Done to Fight a Bad Customer Review?
Has your business been affected by a negative customer review? Please leave a comment to share how you dealt with it. If you have questions about responding to a bad customer review, please call us a 281-343-3284.