How to Deal with Negative Reviews

Receiving bad reviews is never a good feeling, especially when it's your hard work being criticized.

It’s easy to get angry and defensive, but there are many ways you can respond to the criticism whether you’re a freelancer, business owner, or just a regular social media user.

Here are my tips for how to deal with negative reviews.

Avoid taking negative reviews personally

When you’re a small business and have made products on your own, it’s hard not to take negative reviews personally.

So, make a commitment to always muster your most polite responses. Remember that your reviews are visible to the public and people will judge your business based on how your responses are to both positive and negative reviews.

So, to craft good messages you need to have the right mindset.

And practicing not taking certain reviews personally can put you in a headspace to make a response that’s fair and reflects well on your company. Remember that customers are often frustrated and can express themselves emotionally rather than rationally.

And even when you get criticism, remember that it reflects a part of your work or business and not the entirety of the value you offer.

Create templates for different responses

The quote ‘Prevention is the best cure’ can be applied to so many areas of work and life.

If you want to avoid writing a hasty response or adding a comment that makes things worse, then you need to build templates for dealing with difficult customers and bad reviews.

This means creating a guideline or document where you write down hypothetical negative reviews followed by the ‘ideal’ way to respond to them.

You can write down the attitude, tone of voice, phrases, and other elements that will help you express yourself well.

Being prepared is winning half the battle and creating templates and documentation can help you create a consistent experience for customers.

Avoid canned responses

This section or tip seems to contradict the last suggestion. But the point I’m making here is that you should create templates but also personalize them for each review.

People can always tell when you’re copying and pasting something. I’ve come across brands on social media that respond to an entire thread of comments by writing the same message in every single comment.

Mentioning users by name and using your pre-made templates to guide your answers is one way you can avoid making your templates sound canned.

Reply fast

Letting a negative review sit around for too long leaves a poor impression on people coming to your website or online store. They get the impression that you don’t care or that the reviewers’ claims are warranted.

And even if the reviews are merited, not issuing an apology leaves a poor impression.

One of the tasks you should prioritize is responding quickly to messages and reviews. And if you have a team, you should make responding fast a key metric to track performance.

As a leader, you need to be hands-on for a while, help people track reviews with notifications.

Sometimes, even with training, your staff can get stumped with a review or negative feedback. It is important that you make yourself available to guide how they respond when this happens.

Always respond to reviews

This suggestion is related to the previous one. And if you ask many people, they’ll tell you different things about responding to all your reviews.

But in my business, we make it a point to respond to all the reviews that we get. Whether they’re neutral, positive, or negative. I find that when you answer reviews, you show people that you’re active and listening to customers. And this plays a huge role in whether customers decide to buy from you or your competition.

Of course, there will be a time when you are better off not responding to a review, but think of this as a rare occasion rather than a frequent one.

But generally, always respond and respond fast. If you’ve built a template and planned what you should say, then you’ll find this easy to do.

Back to you

These are a few strategies we use in our business to deal with negative reviews. One thing to remember is that your business will not be a fit or a hit with everyone.

Negative reviews are inevitable. But how you handle them can make a world of difference to your brand image.

People are doing research, reading, and making judgments based on what they find about you online.

Being silent can be as damaging as saying the wrong thing. So, be proactive with managing your reviews and you’ll be able to mitigate the effects of poor reviews.