We’ve all seen them – when you are looking up a specific product or service that you are thinking of purchasing and then you see a negative review on the product quality or customer service. Every business fears negative reviews and in many 
situations, this sort of thing keeps business owners from taking the plunge to build out their online presence for fear of receiving negative reviews.
The bad news is that you cannot control if someone decides to write a poor review on your service or product. The good news is that if you respond correctly, more times than not you can redeem yourself and many will not care about that negative review. There are many ways you can alleviate the effects of bad reviews.
The other issue with reviews is the fear that your competition will write a false negative review or an individual will write a false review on your product or service that is entirely untrue. Most of the time, these can also be taken care of!
Our top three suggestions for responding to negative reviews and looking like a rockstar…
- If or when you receive a negative review online, many sites, such as google+ local will allow you to ‘respond publicly as owner’ – we highly recommend this. The key is to respond sincerely and apologize if appropriate. A big no no with responding to online reviews is taking a defensive stance and making the situation worse. Also, in the case that a review is threatening or inappropriate – you can usually suggest it be removed and sometimes they will.
- Realize that negative reviews are going to happen – you can’t make everyone happy but you do have the opportunity to make it right or make internal changes that can assure that you do things right in the first place. Sometimes, reviews can help you understand how others see your company and make it easier for you to work on those weaknesses.
- Lastly and most importantly, encourage your clients/customers to leave a review for you and help them to find those sites. By encouraging positive reviews/asking happy customers to leave a review…. you efficiently ‘bury’ or dilute any negative reviews.
Having an online presence is critical to the growth of your company and the possibility of negative reviews should not hinder you from making the necessary steps to grow your online business and gain new clients!
I have 3 1/2 stars on my facebook page and I see no reviews. How do I handle / help this?? I can not respond to any negative reviews if I can’t see them.
Yeah, I agree. I have 5 star reviews and then ONE 1-star review. I have a feeling this is from someone who has never used my services and is just doing it to be a jerk. Of course, I cannot see who left this review. It doesn’t seem fair that FB can expose a small business owner to a review system that they can’t even monitor or reply to.
@ Randy – sorry for the delayed response! We just took a look at your Facebook page and don’t see the review stars. I know right now that the review feature for Facebook is pretty clunky and doesn’t seem to be finished at all. As for being given a star rating and seeing your reviews – it is possible that some reviews are hidden due to the reviewers privacy settings. It would seem that Facebook would at least allow Page owners to see these but at this point – again it’s not the best. One way to eliminate the review feature on a business page is to remove the address in your about section, or at least modify it so that Facebook doesn’t associate it with a mapped address. (maybe this is what you did to remove the feature already?) This is also how you enable the map being shown on your page. It uses Bing maps for this.