Dealing with bad reviews as a vendor

Online reviews remain one of those things a majority of potential customers observe before patronizing a vendor. Zendesk reveals that 88 per cent of customers has been influenced by online customer service review when making purchasing decisions. It, therefore, implies that the more good reviews you get, the more likely you gain more customers and the more bad reviews you have, the less likely you gain additional customers. Unfortunately, bad reviews could be given about your products or services. When such happens, it might make you feel like online reviewers are holding you hostage.
However, you can deal with them in such a manner that the impact they have on your practice’s reputation is minimized. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to acquaint you with what leads customers to post negative reviews, and how you can respond to or manage them.
What leads to bad reviews?
Often, getting a bad review is hugely unfair. After expending your effort and time in ensuring you provide good customer service, a customer with sour grapes may decide to undermine your expected high productivity by giving you a bad review just because they had a bad day. The unfair remark might tempt you to lash out in return. Unfortunately, following such an intuition may pose a serious threat to your practice.
However, some buyers may get defected products. This will leave them with no better choice than to leave bad reviews. In this case, the reviews are justified.
The great news is that only a few customers say they post bad reviews out of vengeance. Though it may seem that way, a majority of customers complain online because of the bad experience they had  with your product and their wish for you to hear them out and respond to them. Therefore, it is important to give them responses as their reviews help to inform or warn other customers as regards the quality of your practice.
How do you deal with bad reviews?
When you get a bad review, never be defensive; rather, be courteous and professional in your response. Even if the customer remains hellbent in their claimed information which may be false, make an apology; include a positive statement to negate the negative statements they made; finally, thank the customers for their feedback and ask if you could speak with them further offline.
When the customer agrees to this, take the issue offline. Instead of responding to an adverse review in a public forum, a private email chat will be better. This will prevent further damage to your practice.
Send out an online survey to every customer that patronizes you. It is a great way to determine those who had a bad experience, as well as receive feedback on ways of improving the overall experience for all clients.
If the bad review was left due to a defective product, apologize and offer the customer a refund, or a new, free product. You may also offer a more expensive one to make the customer satisfied and show you care.
Try out online review websites such as Social Mention or Review Trackers to give yourself an online presence. Don't be alarmed if you have 2-3 bad reviews. Statistics show that customers think most the positive reviews a vendor gets are fake if they don't have at least one or two bad ones.
Take proactive measures of gathering enough good reviews to overwhelm possible bad reviews. You can put a call to clients after service delivery. It can help to shelve unattractive reviews.
Also ,Taking some bad reviews on their merits might be important; you can learn about the area of your practice that could benefit from such need for improvement, for example improving your QA process.
 

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