The bad reviews are not just painful, but they can also wreak havoc on your business reputation.
When you do your best to run a quality business every day, a negative review can feel like a personal attack. This is especially the case with Google reviews. As they are often the first thing that the customers see, so it is natural for businesses to get perturbed when they see a negative review.
However, panicking is not going to solve the problem for you. You need to first understand if the review is real or fake. Fake reviews need to be flagged immediately. It is discussed further in the later portion of the article.
When to Flag a Google Review
- Irrelevant Comments
- Offensive Comments
- Illegal Contents ( Some products/services are illegal in certain locations and Google prohibits reviews that contain links to email addresses or websites selling illegal products)
- Impersonation
If you think it is a real review then you have to deal with it in a different way. So if you are thinking of fixing the Google reviews, here are few tips. Take a look.
1. First Don’t Stress or Lash Out –
A bad review can make you want to give a piece of your mind to the reviewer. But you should not do that. Instead of losing your mind over it, you should understand that a bad review is not the end of the world and any and every company has got at least one or more of it. In fact, some reviews say bad reviews can enhance sales (after all your brand is getting some kind of publicity which though not desired is better than no publicity) and so you should calm down and go for the next step.
2. Respond to the Review –
The most effectual way of handling a negative review for a customer is responding to it. So nearly a third of all the customers who leave behind negative reviews can end up deleting it if the business responds without delay. As these reviews are public for the consumers as well, they also don’t like to be portrayed as brutal if your team responds with a sincere apology.
3. Fix the Situation –
After apologising, own up the issue faced by the customer and then try to rectify that at the earliest. Dealing and solving the problem is often hardest for the businesses, but doing that as soon as possible can help you gain a loyal customer and also deal with the negative review. If the situation is beyond help, provide ideas about how you can make it better for the customer. You can also provide your contact information and take the conversation on a personal chat after responding publicly once.
4. Ask the Customer to Edit or Remove the Review –
Once you deliver what you promised, follow up to know whether the customer is satisfied. If yes, ask them to edit the review and instruct them how they can change it if they do not know how to go about it. Customers will be happy to do so if they are convinced and happy with your addressing of the issue. They can even take the review down if you can deal with this in the right way.
5. Bury Bad Reviews –
The majority of the people do not read under 6 reviews of the business. This provides a solution if you are not able to do away with a bad review. To fix this, you have to get more positive reviews to push the negative ones away. So with 6 positive reviews most of the consumers won’t get to see the bad one. If you get 10 positive reviews for almost 90% of the consumers the negative review won’t exist. But how will you get the positive reviews!
You can’t get that overnight. For this you can create survey accumulation section or booth at your store. Now follow the steps –
- On a daily basis, you should request the clients to leave reviews for your business
- Start a review campaign or contest
- Request reviews from clients through email
- Train employees for Google reviews
- Follow-up on emails for reviews
- Contact previous consumers for reviewing the business
You can also create a direct link for Google reviews, too.
Apart from these, there are also fake reviews that happen all the time. So if the person (reviewer) doesn’t seem familiar, first check your transaction and see if you have done business with the negative reviewer. Fake reviews are mostly vague and do not contain details. If you are certain that the review is fake, flag it and report to Google without delay and also show the message — “this review is flagged and reported”. This will tell consumers not to take the review seriously.
These are just some of the ways in which you can remove or rather fix Google reviews. These are suggested by experts of premium digital marketing agency in India who have experienced these and know how to reduce the negative impact of these reviews on businesses.
Author Bio: Sawoni Chowdhury is an aficionado of writing. She is an expert writer and blogger and shares her views and opinions on a range of topics such as Lifestyle, Business, Entertainment and lot more.
