On the Make Me A Plan blog, we like to be chipper and upbeat. But there are subjects we have to look at that might not have such a positive feel to them. 

So plantasitic people, in this blog we will be looking at the subject of bad reviews. 

Now, this can and does happen to all organisations at some point. Whether it’s a bad review on Trip Advisor, an employee leaving a negative review on Glassdoor about working for you, or maybe it’s an adverse experience left on an Amazon review – the point is there are many ways stakeholders can voice their opinions. That’s before we’ve even touched on social media platforms as a way of people having their say on your organisation. 

It’s great that there are websites out there that allow people to let others know about their experiences interacting with your organisation, and constructive criticism is a useful feedback tool – and your reply to these customers should be as such, letting them know that you have taken their information on board and will improve from their feedback. 

But what about those feedbacks that you feel are unjustified? These also need managing for any damage limitation without also getting into an argument with the customer in question. Depending on the nature of their complaint, you may want to try doing the following:

• If their complaint is made publically on a website or social media platform, invite that person to contact you via a direct message (DM) or give a company email address that they can contact you on. This takes the conversation out of the public domain and therefore can help to stop a potential tit-for-tat argument ensuing and other users of the site jumping in with unhelpful comments. 

• Remember – that if you do take to a private DM or email – the customer could still screenshot your responses and post them online, so make sure that anything you write is clear, non-argumentative, and looking for a satisfactory resolution all round.     

• The best resolutions to these conversations can lead to the customer going back onto the website that they posted on to let others know that the matter has been resolved – thus giving you a gain back in customer relationship management (CRM) and restoring reputation. 

But what if it’s a website with no right of reply for the organisation and the customer/employee has decided to remain anonymous with no way of you being able to contact them to find out more about their issue?  Well, this can be tricky. It is unhelpful to go down the route of creating fake positive reviews to counterbalance the negative ones – audiences will see the disingenuous nature of your actions. The best thing to do here is to gently encourage customers to leave a good review if they have had a good experience. It’s not a bad thing to flag to people who are genuinely happy with the product or service they have received to be invited to leave a review for you – that’s just sensible PR right? It’s just making sure you go about this in the right way and don’t make people feel pressured into leaving a good review. Authenticity is everything these days – we’re a savvy bunch in the 21^st century!