Regardless of where a customer might find your business, the first things they will do are look at your reviews and visit your website. If your reviews don’t compete and your website doesn’t convert, then they will go to your competitors who have optimized these steps in the consumer journey.
Generally to be competitive, a business needs to maintain a review rating of 4.6-4.8 out of 5 stars. In other words, for every negative review, a business needs to generate 10 positive reviews. It’s OK not to have a rating of 5.0 out of 5 stars. Businesses are run by humans and humans make mistakes; it is unrealistic to expect that you can provide perfect service for everybody, and some people just can’t be pleased.
For a lot of business owners, getting a negative review can certainly ruin your day. The “game over, you lose” sound effect from The Price Is Right is one of the most accurate ways to demonstrate how it feels (and some who are reading this can probably even hear it without even clicking the link to listen). However, if handled correctly, a negative review can be mitigated have very little negative impact on your business and even be an opportunity. Here are 5 essential steps for handling negative reviews:
1. Flag the review if it violates any policies
The primary criteria that most review platforms want, or their number 1 policy, is for the reviews to come from actual customer interactions. If the review is from someone who is not an actual customer, then flag it or report it. Some examples of reviews that often happen which are not from actual customers include the following:
- Mistaken identity – the user isn’t tech savvy enough to notice which business they clicked on in search results or leave a review for a similarly-named business
- An uber delivery driver didn’t like the way the front office person treated them when they delivered the food.
- People with road rage don’t like how your technicians drive
- An ex-employee who left the business on bad terms
- People who don’t agree with the politics that the business might support either through funding or social media.
- People who don’t like how the business is advertising or marketing
- People who comment on the parking lot or outside conditions of a business
- Vendors and contractors are not customers
Other policies might include things like hate speech. Review extortion is a policy violation, which is when a customer tries to leverage reviews to get more than what they paid for. Each platform will have their own policies which you can review to determine this step.
If the reviewer has said anything slanderous or untrue about your business then that could be grounds to get a lawyer involved, and all platforms will remove a review when required by law.
(On a separate note, reviews from you and your staff are also not legitimate customer interactions, and could even get your business suspended from the platform. The policies apply to everyone.)
2. Honest Self-Reflection
If the negative review came from a legitimate customer interaction, then the next step is honest self-reflection. This particular step won’t necessarily change the review itself, but it could improve your business so that you avoid similar negative reviews in the future, and even improve to earn more positive reviews.
Sometimes it can be easy to justify or rationalize mistakes made by the business because it is impossible to please everyone, and some reviewers can be so rude that you want to just ignore them. Sometimes ego can get in the way. Put all of that aside and ask yourself if any element about that review could be true. Is it revealing any aspects of your products, services or customer experience that needs to be fixed? What clues does it give you and your business to improve, even if it was rude or poorly worded or left by a psycho? As you do this open-mindedly, you’ll discover that while that customer may have been a jackass, they still provided actionable insight to your business and how your operations can improve. And in some ways, that can even be more valuable than receiving a 5-star review as a social courtesy.
3. Work With The Customer, Within Reason, To Change The Review
If the review doesn’t violate any policies, then the review platform won’t remove it, which means that only person who can remove or change it is the person who left it.
Quite often customers are reasonable, and if you reach out to them personally to correct mistakes, then they will often remove or change the review. The business must correct the mistake without any conditions, but once the mistakes are corrected it’s OK to ask, “If we’ve made things right, would you consider updating your review to reflect your latest experience?” Another phrase you could use is, “We’re glad we could make this right for you. If you feel our team turned your experience around, updating your review would mean a lot to us, though there is no obligation.”
The rules against offering bribes, refunds, or additional services in exchange for changing a review are not just platform policies. That’s an FTC regulation that can even result in civil penalties if violated. The service must be corrected without conditions, then you can politely ask the customer to change the review.
Occasionally you may also get a bad egg and there’s nothing within reason that you can do. Proceed to step 4.
4. Post a Public Reply
Posting a response to all reviews, not just negative ones, can be beneficial for both users and SEO. If you weren’t able to contact the customer in step #3 then this can potentially be a secondary opportunity. However, replying to negative reviews serves a strategic purpose of factually telling your side of the story and showing other customers that you can handle complaints professionally.
Posting a public response to a negative review isn’t necessarily for the customer who left the negative review, its for hundreds of other potential customers who read it. Most potential customers will not read every review reply. They’ll look at the overall rating and then browse across some of the reviews to get a feel for your business. The negative reviews are among the most commonly-read reviews, because customers aren’t just reading the complaint; they are evaluating how your business behaves when things go wrong. A thoughtful response proves that your company is accountable, professional, and composed under pressure.
A bad review presents an uncontrolled narrative. Your reply allows you to fill in critical context, set the record straight, and defend your business standard without sounding defensive.
Here are some general guidelines for replying to reviews:
- Maintain a calm, professional tone at all times.
- When You Are at Fault: Issue a sincere, direct apology. Own the mistake, outline how you intend to fix it, and offer to take the conversation offline. Do not apologize for things outside your control or for rules you correctly enforced.
- The “Kill Them with Kindness” Approach: When dealing with unreasonable or overly aggressive complaints, respond with flawless courtesy and empathy. Potential customers will quickly spot the contrast between your professional poise and the reviewer’s irrationality.
- Firmly Setting the Record Straight (The Subtle Call-Out): When a reviewer acts in bad faith, present objective facts that allow the reader to draw their own conclusions. Never use accusatory language like “You are a bad customer.” Instead, stick strictly to verified timeline details:
- Credit Card Chargebacks: “Our records confirm that the agreed service was completed on [Date] in full alignment with your signed scope. We see that a payment dispute was subsequently opened with your card issuer…”
- Review Extortion: “We strive to address genuine feedback. However, per our company policy (and FTC regulations), we cannot issue full cash refunds in exchange for removing online reviews after services have been delivered as agreed. We would hope that all customers leave accurate reviews that reflect the true and total experience with our business.
Can we use AI to reply to reviews?
Using AI to reply to positive reviews can actually help SEO with signals like responsiveness rate, keyword relevance and account activity, as long as the AI is trained to make the replies unique and relevant to the review given. Template and repetitive responses can actually hurt SEO, so the AI must be trained properly and reviewed often.
Should AI be used to reply to NEGATIVE reviews?
Absolutely not without human review and editing. Don’t let AI agents or automation reply to negative reviews. However, you can use AI to help change the tone of a review after you’ve inputted the facts, and use AI to revise a reply so it sounds more professional, but is still accurate and on-brand.
5. The Solution To Pollution is Dilution, Get Automated Review Generation
The phrase, “The Solution To Pollution is Dilution” is often used by wound care doctors who are treating infections; and it could be used by any professional who works with chemicals. In the case of reviews, the infection or pollution to your review profile is the negative review, and a pollutant can be diluted either by removing the pollutant, which is step 3 above, or adding more dilutant.
As stated at the beginning of this article, a business needs to maintain a review rating of 4.6-4.8 out of 5 stars to stay competitive. In other words, for every negative review, a business needs to generate 10 positive reviews.
Negative review dilution is practically non-existent for newer businesses or businesses that have not actively built up their review profile, so if a negative review is received early, it can be even more difficult to get those 10 new and positive reviews to outweigh it.
Step 2 above already mentioned the importance of improving customer service. Indeed, the best way to generate positive reviews is to genuinely earn them. However, it’s more human nature to leave a negative review when upset, than to remember to leave a positive review when happy. Being happy is expected by the customer, so when their experience is over they might go on their merry way and forget about it. That’s why they need to be called to action.
Using a review generator is one of the most effective ways to generate positive reviews because they prompt the customer, or call them action, at the right moment – after the sale has been completed or the service has been provided. If your business is not using a review generator, then you’re probably getting left in the dust by your competitors who are.
There are hundreds of review generation applications (or software), but they are certainly not all created equal. Generating positive reviews is important enough not to settle for a review generator that is cheap, ineffective or simply tacked on as a feature to something else you are already subscribed to. It should be a review generator that is specifically designed for review generation and has the best user experience to produce the most reviews possible. A better user experience means more customers will actually complete the process of leaving the review – when you increase convenience, you increase conversions. Learn more about this on the Local SEO & Repuation Management page and download the free ebook: The Ducks of Local Business Marketing.
Currently, Mirex Marketing offers two review generators, one is built-in to the CRM that we offer (powered by Go High Level, GHL, which is focused on marketing), and the other is an independent application that can integrate with any CRM or customer database that integrates with Zapier. They are both effective at generating reviews, though the independent application is a little better. Both include automated publishing of positive reviews as posts on social media, which are among the most effective social media posts you can have. They also have review aggregation, which means we can publish all your reviews in one place on your website from most of the top platforms. Both can also include AI-generated replies to reviews. Contact us to discuss these options.
Special note for Yelp: Yelp has an explicit “no solicitations” policy and review generators should not be used with Yelp. As a decentralized Yelp Advertising Partner, Mirex Marketing cannot provide any type of review solicitation for Yelp, and even without the Partner status we do not recommend it. Our philosophy for every online platform used for marketing is to support the purposes for which they were created to maximize their rewards and avoid any penalties.