Negative reviews, the nightmares of any online business: 

Well, there is no easy way to put this. Negative reviews hurt. They hurt like the time in second grade you spent three hours on a pastel drawing only to have your elder sibling make fun of it saying the tiger you drew looked more like a dog. Well, maybe not that much. But somewhere along the line, you feel underestimated, unrecognized and doubt your credibility. While it is important to keep in mind that even if you are the best in your craft, there will always be people who will not be happy with what you do no matter how good you are at it. That’s just how society functions.

Having taken that into consideration, there is always going to be reviews that are a potential risk to your business. Sometimes they have been left by a thoroughly dissatisfied customer who simply did not like your product / service and went a bit too far in giving an honest feedback. Sometimes, these reviews are, let’s just say, not very professional or friendly in nature.

There will always be a few of ‘those guys’: 

Sometimes the customer tends to get carried away and ends up using profanities that are simply ugly to look at on your website. Sometimes the reviews are left by your competitors to ruin your reputation and affect your sales. Sometimes it is just a vindictive person you have had the misfortune to build a personal vendetta with. In short, there are always going to be bad reviews that you may receive despite how hard you aim at customer service… and honestly, you shouldn’t worry too much. 

As they rightfully say, you can’t really please everyone no matter how hard you try can you?  

The importance of customer reviews: 

It is true that a bit too many of those one or two-star ratings can be catastrophic for your online business. As it is, people usually rely on customer feedback if they are looking to buy a product or avail a service online. If the reviews are bad the customer is essentially not going to avail that service or buy that product. 

So what do we do? 

Customer reviews are the benchmark of determining a product’s worth in the online market. So needless to say, reviews that can break your business are worth being removed. Unfortunately, it isn’t as easy at it sounds.  True, there are options of removing a review but to be more specific, you need to requestGoogle to remove it for you. There is no big red delete button.  

So how does that work anyway? 

Customer service is key: 

The safest and quickest way is probably to request the customer himself to remove the review. It will take a lot of troubleshooting, escalation resolving follow-up and convincing but it’s always worth the shot.  

Below is the list of steps that you could follow. 

• You could simply request your customer to delete it, which sounds like a simple thing to do. The problem arises when your customer is going all tooth and claw on you and refuses to budge. Such scenarios usually take a lot of convincing and pampering and assurance to resolve the customer’s grievance.  
• If you can establish the fact that the review in question is either false, made by a competitor to defame you and ruin your sales and promote their product or seriously derogatory / abusive/ vulgar in nature, you can flag it and reach out to google to remove it.  But as mentioned earlier, that is one heck of a time consuming process and honestly by the time you can even have it removed, if you can manage that, the damage would have already been done.   
• As a last resort, you could get yourself a lawyer and sue them, but then again, as we all know, that too is going to take a while… and by the time you are done with it, if you win, you might even find yourself questioning if all the toil was worth it.  

Handling an irate customer: 

If you wake up to a negative review on your beloved business, don’t panic. It happens to the top tier guys and gals out there, even the leviathans of the corporate world and the MNCs. The key is to not just remove the review as that may be ( or most likely will ) be equated with escapism. So your best bet is to make sure your customers know why this happened without sounding defensive or condescending so they continue having trust in future interactions with you for fear that another mistake could happen again later on down the road.

Keeping that in mind, let us discuss the more uncomfortable but surest and quickest way to tackle a negative review.  You guessed it right. Facing the problem head-on. Handling an irate customer. 

• An apology never fails to impress: “We’re sorry to hear about your bad experience. I hope we can work this out so that you are happy with us in the future! What would be most helpful for you at this time? Would it help if we talked through some of these concerns or had someone else review what happened and assist going forward?”
• Resolve the issue. Follow up and keep the customer proactively informed of what you are going to do for him to gain back his faith: “We are going to make sure that we fix this problem.” Even if a refund of the customer’s money is what is required to resolve the dispute, assure the customer that he is going to get it. “We are offering everyone who ordered one of these books a full refund”. Be direct and specific, without any arrogance or defensiveness.  
• Add a little pinch of marketing in your revert to the review: 

Explain how you are eager to retain the said individual or company as a customer and that you are ready to do what it takes to achieve that. “We take pride in providing quality service with every order so if you were not satisfied, please let us know how else we can make it up to you!!”

• Take ownership. Make the call : You don’t need to get into a ping pong match with a negative reviewer. That could be an endless thread and will only serve as content for memes and the joke will most likely be on you. So get off the internet, pick up the phone and just call the guy.!!!  It will only serve as a goodwill gesture that you made an effortto call your customer and resolve the query in hand. Take ownership and authority. Put it out that you’re the one in charge you’ll get it done. Take the conversation offline and either communicate by phone or in person, depending on the extent of damage control that you need to do. Be approachable, “Feel free to reach out to me. I am the owner and I feel that your valued feedback will help us improve our craft and serve you better in the future.  

With the start of 2022 where the dawn of the new age that is the post-Covid era has made everything online, customer is god and customer reviews are gospel. They determine whether your business stands or flies or falls. So customer service is essentially the primary tool that makes a business stand out and flourish. If you’re not able to manage your reviews, take help from a reputation management agency for the same.If we are talking about how to remove negative reviews from your website in 2022, the best way would be to turn the negative experience into a positive one and leave every negative review as a testimonial to how, in your business, every problem is figureoutable.