Dealing With Negative Customer Feedback

Getting negative customer feedback can be a blessing in disguise for many companies. Even though no one wants to receive negative reviews, companies can’t improve their efforts without it. That’s because, for every single customer that speaks out about a negative experience, there are about a dozen other customers that decided to keep their opinion to themselves. That means companies need to pay attention to any type of negative feedback they receive from customers so they can improve the customer experience, and not lose out on other customers.

Options

One of the worst things that a company can do when receiving negative feedback from customers is to simply ignore it. If a potential customer sees a negative review of a company that seems to have been ignored by that company, they are a lot more likely to do business with another company instead. On the other hand, nearly half of all customers are a lot more likely to do business with a company that actually responds to the negative reviews it has received from customers. There are a few different ways for companies to respond to negative feedback so that other potential customers are encouraged to do business with the company despite any negative experiences from other customers. Additionally, companies have to respond to negative reviews publicly, to show the customers that they are working on improving the customer experience, instead of keeping things private and not responding to criticism.

It’s not always easy for companies to know how to respond to negative feedback from customers, however, one of the most important things that companies have to keep in mind, is not to reply as soon as they receive that negative feedback. That’s because reacting to any sort of criticism immediately tends to make people a lot more defensive and emotional, which is not going to be helpful when dealing with criticism. In fact, being emotional or defensive in a review response tends to make companies look uncooperative or unprofessional. That’s why it’s important for companies to take some time to analyze the feedback they received and then develop a constructive response.

For the response itself, companies need to begin with an apology, no matter how frustrating or wrong the review might be. Then, the company can express its disappointment with the negative situation, and highlight the fact that what the customer experienced isn’t the regular customer experience that other customers have. If the problem that the customer has brought up doesn’t seem very urgent, companies can always suggest that the customer reach out to customer service and take the discussion away from public spaces. And finally, companies can also insert some key marketing messages in their responses, such as talking about how the company is known for its outstanding customer service, but something went wrong in the instance of that unhappy customer.