You are like most other business owners. You care what people say about your company. You work hard to ensure people know about it and you spend a great deal of time working towards improving your company’s reputation. That’s why, when you are looking at your company’s reviews online, you get frustrated, even mad, when you find a negative review. How could someone say something like that about your company? Whether the information in the review is accurate, misleading, or simply unfair or not, it is up to you to take the steps to fix it. But, what do you do?
What You Don’t Do
Resist the urge to immediately fire back at the individual in a nasty number of posts. You do not want or need to respond in this manner and doing so can actually cause you more damage than good. You don’t want to contact the site and threaten them with a lawsuit or make other claims. Instead of taking these steps, which are unlikely to get you anywhere, there’s one simple thing you can do right now to help improve the situation.
Contact the Owner of the Comment
If possible, contact this person directly, through email, over the phone, or through their social media account. Ask them, nicely and with your very best intentions, what you can do to improve the situation. Ask what happened and get the facts. Take the personal attack feelings you are having out of the picture. Find out what you can do to make the situation better. And, genuinely mean it. It is your goal to improve this person’s thoughts of your company.
If they will not change their sentiment, you can take a secondary step. That step is to leave a comment on the same site or review. However, you don’t want to leave anything negative here. Leave your side of the story, including what you are doing or what you have done, to fix the problem. Be sure to be positive and encouraging. Don’t beg for forgiveness or otherwise admit to guilt. Simply apologize for what happened, state what you have done to fix the problem, and note that you reached out to the individual to make it right.
By taking this simple course of action, you’ll not only appease that disgruntled customer, but you will also ensure that other people know that you are truly dedicated to quality customer service. Ultimately, that is critically important to every business.
