Reputation Management 101: Three Mistakes People Make When Responding To Negative Reviews

Negative reviews can be the bane of any company’s existences.  In a world where the right or wrong kind of review can make or break your business, it’s understandable that many managers and employees spend time scouring the web to look for reviews.  There are a lot of Custom Smart Homes reviews, and our experiences with them have taught us a lot on the proper way to handle them.  You’ll see a lot of advice online about the right way to respond to reviews, but you don’t see too much information on how to not respond to your company’s reviews.  If you’re thinking about how you’re going to respond to a negative review, make sure you avoid making these common mistakes.

Responding without saying anything specific

Some people think that generic responses are the best way to deal with customer reviews, but if you want to get a positive response from readers it’s one of the worst things you can do.  A response like, “I’m sorry that you are unhappy with our services.  Please contact us so we can make sure that you have a better experience with our company”, doesn’t address the customer’s actual complaint.  Making a response that could virtually be about any problem shows readers that you’re more concerned about appearing concerned than about actually improving the customer’s experience.

Playing the blame game

When you see a negative review about your business, it’s natural to feel the need to defend your business.  Maybe you remember this particular customer acting rude towards or staff, or maybe you think that the client was confused about what your products and services actually did.  Either way, trying to defend your company by saying that the customer was the one at fault is a bad way to improve your reputation.  Even if what you’re saying is true, people who read your response will wonder why your company seems to want to place the blame on the customer instead of trying to fix the problem.

Responding to every single bad review

If someone is writing a bad review about your company you’re going to want to tell your side of the story, but if you respond to every single negative review you won’t be doing much to help your company’s image.  If you take time to respond to every review, readers are going to wonder why your company is dedicated to finding negative reviews and responding to them.  Your excessive responses could make some readers think that your company is aggressively responding to reviews because you have a lot of unhappy customers.