Does your brand suffer from negative reviews? Wondering, how to respond to negative messages that reflect on your service or products?
Why Online Reputation and Reviews Should Matter to Brands?
Every day, billions of people use the internet to get information, conduct research, write reviews, find locations, share stories, design things, and buy and sell products and services. Invariably, you have to be at your best in the online space.
Negative Feedback is not a Negative Thing.
When a brand gets a negative review, the general response is “wishing it away” or finding faults with the review. However, it is crucial that negative reviews are not only recognized as a hazard but as an opportunity. A rare negative review also indicates that your organization is real and trustworthy as long as you get positive feedback. Plus, it makes positive feedback more valuable. You may try, for example, to turn a disgruntled client into a delighted client. Also, customer insights reviews provide can be used to optimize/customize/improve your product or service.
Potential clients check how your brand reacts to criticism. You get a score in your favor if you answer well. React negatively, and you may want to kiss the future client goodbye.
Definitely, there are various levels of negativity. To clarify, it’s not possible that reputation will be adversely affected if a client submits a negative review, but your online reputation could be greatly affected if your CEO is found to be engaged in fraudulent activity.
The scale and severity of damage depending on your response. It is possible to address and handle a negative review or consumer issue in-house. Content strategy can be used to mitigate negative news or a negative review.
Let us show you how to handle the derogatory content and restore a damaged online reputation.
Using Online Reputation Management (ORM) Software
Social listening: You have to be aware of them before you can fix negative reviews or mentions. As more and more customers use social media & online review sites as channels for complaints, queries, appreciation, it is impossible to manually track them well in time. That’s where the tools come in. Small businesses with budget limitations could also use some free software to know about mentions or feedback made about your business or brand.
A couple of free tools to monitor your online reputation
- Google Alerts: Get notifications about the brand mention or the term used on the web. It’s free, effective & easy.
- Rankur has a free version tool to monitor mentions across the web
Turn Real Peril or Social Media Mentions to Your Advantage
It is fine if you can solve some issues on your client’s channel. Transparency reveals, there is nothing to hide. If you need to delete the channel from the conversation, say email or private messaging, after a resolution has been formed, be sure to update the original thread.
You may respond to reviews on Facebook from your page or directly react to comments. Switch the talk to Messenger for a private exchange.
On Twitter, with a @reply, you may respond to any post. Move your talk to a direct message for a private exchange.
You can respond to mentions on Instagram with a comment containing the @username. Move your talk to a direct message for a private exchange.
Getting a bad review or rating is an indication that something is wrong. Understand the root cause of why it was given and turn it into a positive.
Find out why someone is upset and respond to the specific channel they used to share their feedback.
Reason 1: The consumer needs to help you improve your product or service.
The customer has endured the pain with your service, whether the complaint is justified or not, and wants to warn you before more customers feel pain.
Turn this into Advantage
In this case, what the client is seeking is most often a genuine “we are sorry and thank you for your feedback”.
This client needs to see how you react to what they have told you and what you’re going to do about it. They aren’t likely to provide suggestions again if you do nothing. They will be happy if you thank them & explain how their suggestions are used, & you will have a good relationship with them.
React to the feedback and make sure the customer is aware of your response. This should not be an automated customer process. A trained person who can respond to honest feedback must respond to such feedback.
Reason 2: Upset Customer feels Unheard, Unacknowledged via Customer Care Process
The consumer gets upset, they face greater emotions and feel the need to convey it, whether it is justified or not
When a consumer is disgruntled, they experience intense emotion and feel the need to express it, whether it’s justified or not. They will escalate the matter online with the intention of getting an answer from you.
If the customer has a poor service experience, they have strong feelings about it, and if a brand doesn’t acknowledge feelings, he will vent out on social media, friends, family, and more. Both are bad circumstances to be in with any brand and can damage your reputation online. It is possible that missing the review or mention would make the matter worse.
The client has endured a problem by your system, whether the complaint is justified or not, he/she needs you to understand his/her pain.
Turn into Advantage
Place yourself in the shoes of your client. Show them that you take responsibility and feel sorry for stirring up their anger,
If their anger is justified. In the reply, take responsibility for the error, recognize the frustrations of the user, and apologize. With an excellent response, you can flip the poor experience into a positive one. Consider offering a free service or product update to make it up.
Customer will tell friends and family of their service recovery experience with your brand when you offer something meaningful
Reason 3: Secure your reputation from unwarranted mentions
When we encountered bad service before the internet became integral to our lives, we’d turn to friends and family to convey it to ordinary people. Those individuals would spread the news further over time (word-of-mouth). But now It takes just a few seconds for customers to post a negative review online and that can rip a reputation to pieces by spreading the news to millions.
Nowadays, before making a buying decision, most people perform online research, it’s important that trust in your goods or services is inspired by what they find about your brand online.
Here are a few examples of what could damage your reputation.
- Paid Product Reviews have shown as genuine, but are written by paid people for selling products and aren’t useful to consumers. Paid affiliates don’t show their relationship with a brand, write with an angle to ensure the product comes off well.
- Disgruntled Employees or Competitors use the online space to propagate negative or misleading claims about your company and tarnish your brand.
- Negative or Defaming News report about a fraudulent or criminal act involving one of your top executives or employees.
It takes a well-thought-out strategy to manage negative mentions that are described above. You may either do it yourself or hire a consultant or PR firm, depending on the nature of the allegations.
You need to invest in premium content that is prepared for search if you want to handle it yourself. You get the best form of control, in this way leaving some negative details trailing in your positive content’s dust.
Before you have an issue on your hands, publish the content. Few content ideas:
- Publish Guest Blogs, Case Studies, White Papers that reflects your expertise
- Publish Video Testimonials
- Create Wiki Entry
- Answers queries in Online Forums
Produce white papers, guest blog posts, and case studies that reflect your expertise. If you come under threat, being proactive and organized goes a long way towards your online reputation.
If you think that your present content does not lead to negating any negative mentions, analyze your credibility as it is. Look at any negative outcomes and come up with a content strategy to fix these problems and solve them.
What do you think about that? Have you had to deal with negative feedback online? How did you respond? What other tips would you give me?
