How to respond to good and poor reviews

What are some helpful tips on responding to good and bad reviews?

Responding to customer feedback is critical to building a positive online presence. Quickly answering online reviews shows customers that you appreciate and value their feedback. Your responses on Google are sent to them, which reminds them of the excellent experience. Viewers of your profile know you are listening, which generates even more feedback. Google uses the number and recency of reviews and your responsiveness to influence where your business appears in search results.

Four steps for responding to positive reviews

You want to make sure those positive reviews don’t go unanswered.

1. Thank the customer for taking the time to provide the review or just for visiting your business.
2. Make sure you mention the business name so that review shows up in your search engine results.
3. There is an opportunity for a little bit of marketing – highlighting a special or just glowing about how great your business is. You want to highlight something for your future customers to see.
4. Invite the customer to do something, whether returning to the business or spreading the word.

Ok so how about negative reviews?

It is very important that you do reply to those negative reviews. Replying shows that the business isn’t just sweeping its problems under the rug, and they’re actually taking corrective steps to make sure that situation doesn’t happen again. Remember, this isn’t just the one person who wrote the review you’re replying to. Anybody who comes across that review is gonna see the response.

How to respond to negative reviews

1. You want to make sure you apologize and sympathize with the customer’s concerns. You want to make sure that they feel
2. Throw in a little bit of marketing to take that situation and spin it so that your future customers will see that whatever negative experience happens is unacceptable for the business.
3. Keep it short and swee. You don’t want to go into too much detail. A rule of thumb is three sentences. That should be plenty of time for you to get your point across. As a side note, make sure you don’t mention the business name! You don’t want that negative review to be showing up whenever people are looking for your business online.
4. This is probably the most important one, make sure that you provide that customer with someone offline that can handle their complaint. This will prevent a lengthy public back-and-forth between you and your customer.

For more detailed suggestions read our post “Responding to Negative Reviews.”

How to get more five-star reviews

I’m sure that many of your customers have had great experiences. You can use these happy customers to get new customers by having them leave a review. But how do you get them to leave a review?

1. Essentially it’s simple, just ask.