Bad Reviews: A Hidden Opportunity

As we discussed in the last blog post, reviews are one of your best tools in activating sales and creating marketing content that speaks the language and tone of your customers. If that doesn’t ring a bell, click here to go to the previous post. We’ll wait for you to come back. Remember, we’re here for you.

Today, let’s talk about something that all companies face but don’t want to think about until it happens: a bad review.

Cue the foreboding music.

One Bad Review

You got a bad review.

Honestly, it was bound to happen. If you think about how many customers you deal with, a frustrated or unhappy customer had to happen at some point. Before we dig into why getting a bad review is a good opportunity, let’s lay some ground rules on how we respond to a bad review.

1. Don’t argue with the reviewer.
2. Respond to the review to acknowledge the complaint.
3. Reach out to the reviewer offline.
4. Don’t request the customer take down the bad review.
5. Learn from it.

Let’s dig into those ground rules first:

Don’t argue with the customer online. This is the biggest of them all. Yes, you should respond but do not argue with them online. Arguing only worsens the issue and shows potential customers that you’re combative. Even if you are 100% in the right and it hurts your professional pride, don’t argue. Think of this bad review like a customer yelling at you in a packed store. Are you going to yell back? No, you take a deep breath and you control the situation. This is the same deal.

Do respond to them. You should personally respond to the review that you have seen this complaint and will contact them offline soon to discuss this further. Don’t say something like “…make the situation right” or along those lines because that implies something was wrong. Also, don’t invite them to reach out to you. Say you are going to contact them. That’s proactive and not reactive.

Contact them offline. Do what you say you’re going to do and reach out to them. Don’t just promise it. Keep contacting until you get hold of someone. When you get a hold of them, handle the issue like any other customer service issue. Listen. Act. Improve. This is an opportunity to showcase your awesome customer service skills.

Do not ask them to take down the review. I know it will be tempting to do that but don’t. Even if they ask. If they want to post an update on how you made the issue correct, that’s even better. But don’t ask them to do that. Let them do it on their own accord. You want that bad review. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Learn from it. Let’s get into that now.

Why Bad Reviews Are Good Things

I’m not good with criticism. Although I have improved, I still don’t handle criticism very well. My lizard brain kicks in almost immediately and begins to question why I am being criticized, who is criticizing, and how I can discredit what they are saying. It takes a lot of conscious thought to stop my immediate dismissal of what someone is pointing out and see the merit in what they say.

Bad reviews feel personal so we want to dismiss them immediately. But bad reviews are good things for two big reasons:

• They point out something that isn’t working correctly.
• They add legitimacy to our other reviews.

Let’s dig into this:

Something Isn’t Working Correctly

My youngest son has a t-shirt that says “Programming is 10% writing code and 90% understanding why it’s not working.” Maybe it’s not the same percentages but that statement is very true about business. We create a product/service, sell that to a customer, and then process that transaction. We do this over and over… sometimes successfully and sometimes not. But it’s not where we learn how to improve. Just like programming, we get better by learning why it’s not working.

A bad review is your business not working. It could be major or minor but something isn’t working properly. A bad review is an opportunity to review our code (business operations) and find out where things went off the rail. You might have had 95% of things stay on the tracks but, in this case, they skipped off the rails. Now it’s time to review all the steps and see where things went wrong. Maybe the review can pinpoint the actual place or maybe you need to go through every step but this is an opportunity to make your operations run smoother. It’s an opportunity to improve things. That’s a gift that you shouldn’t pass up.

Bad Reviews Add Verisimilitude

Have you ever found a restaurant where all the reviews are amazing and you’ve wondered for a moment if they are real reviews? I’ve encountered it a few times and the skeptic in me raises its ugly head. My wife always looks at the 1 or 2-star reviews for trends to see if something is lurking underneath all the glowing reviews.

Bad reviews give good reviews legitimacy. When users see bad reviews, it makes the good reviews more legitimate. Reviews aren’t tailored then and can be trusted. Bad reviews are also read to see how the business replies and if they are throwing up any red flags that people will want to watch out for.
Nothing is perfect. As consumers we want to buy a product or service that does what it says it should do from a company that has integrity and is in business for all the right reasons. Bad reviews show that companies make mistakes… and that they can learn from them.

Wrapping Things Up

Let’s be clear: I’m not saying you should go out and intentionally screw things up so you get some bad reviews. Or that you should cut corners because a couple of bad reviews won’t kill you. What I am saying is that bad reviews are opportunities to learn. As kids we made mistakes and, hopefully, we learned from them. Heck, it’s why we’re supposed to learn our history so we don’t make the same mistakes over again.

We should own our mistakes, acknowledge them, and learn from them. In this digital age, a lot of that owning, acknowledging, and learning happens online. Businesses need to embrace that and create workflows to address that.

Next up on #ReviewsLand, we’re going to talk about using reviews to generate new products and services. If your customers are already talking to you, why not ask them what more you could do?