“Why are only negative reviews showing up about my product? There are many more positive reviews as well. Why don’t they show up on the top of search?”
“Why is my rating slipping on ecommerce websites? Is my business doomed?”
“I am fed up of people posting negatively about my product. I can tell for sure some of them haven’t even used it.”
”I woke up to find 1000 hate tweets about my product. I later realized it was because I decided not to respond to a negative tweet yesterday. Just one negative tweet has snowballed into this fiasco.”
If your business has been present online long enough, chances are you have already faced one of these situations. How you react, determines whether your business heads north or south thereafter. This is exactly what is called Reputation Management or ORM (online reputation management).
It is actually not just about managing difficult situations or handling negative feedback. ORM is about constantly monitoring and tackling any online talk about you, positive as well as negative.
Why is reputation management important?
- 95% of young adults read reviews online before going to any local businesses.
- 89% also read business’s response to reviews.
- 91% trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
- 80% of them have written online reviews at least for some local business.
(Source: BrightLocal’s Local Review Survey 2018)
And this is true even for brick and mortar businesses like Restaurants and Cafés and hotels.
So, you can choose to be blind to what consumers are saying about you online and keep wondering why your business is declining or you can be proactive and do something about it.
How do you monitor your
bad business reviews?
There are many online monitoring tools that will help you keep a check on what people are saying online about your business.
- Google Alerts – The easiest and free monitoring tool to check on what’s being said about you online. It can get you information from news, blogs, webpages, videos, books and discussions online. You can also select the language and region to create alerts.
- Social Searcher– Another free monitoring tool that helps you specifically keep an eye on social mentions about your brand or product. A paid account can help you get additional services and create daily email notifications.
- Senti One – This is a professional paid service which can help you monitor as well as deal with most social media presence. They have AI enabled bots to help you automate replies on chat and can also help you find influencers related to your product.
Point being, there are many tools available to track what users are saying about your business, but what you do about it, will make all the difference.
Should I always reply to every Negative review?
The short answer is YES. The long answer is NOT ALWAYS.
YES, because acknowledging feedback immediately makes the conversation positive and stops things from spiraling out of control.
- A short “Thanks for your feedback, we will definitely look into it.” immediately shows your intention of taking it seriously and doing something about it. (This should follow up with actual improvement in service on ground.)
- It also gives you an opportunity to understand exactly what needs to improve.
- Remember, your reply to a negative review is actually more relevant for a potential customer than a positive review itself.
NO, when someone is attacking you out of ill intentions to hurt your reputation. When it’s a genuine customer they will give you details of their experience and tell you exactly where you went wrong. In such cases you need to positively accept the feedback and really work on it. Even if initially they sound very angry, they will sober down after you inform about the actions you are taking to improve yourself. And most of the times it will be a genuine customer and things can end on a positive note after this.
But if it is an ill-intended attack, they will write hate tweets, go on a rampage to disrepute you and just throw abuses at you on every forum. The first response should be the same, to engage with the customer and try to understand the issue. Through their response, you can make out if it is fake or not. Continuing to explain yourself after that is only going to sap your energy and time and give them unnecessary attention. Any real customer will anyways filter out such bad reviews and not make a decision based on them.
If it really starts to hurt your business you need to deal with it more aggressively,
- Get SEM help to make positive reviews more visible and push the bad reviews out of sight. This should solve it 99% of the times.
- But if it’s going on and on with no end. Try putting your side of the story subtly but truthfully. You could directly point to that particular incidence and put the truth out there in a blog on and again get SEM for it.
- Finally if still it persists, you could consider getting legal help. Usually this should be the last resort because even if you win, it will be expensive and exhaustive.
Lastly how to stay on top of the game
Know that a good online reputation is not a one-time activity. Just like traditionally companies hire PR agencies to keep a tab on their reputation in the market, Online Reputation is also an ongoing situation which needs continuous monitoring, remedial actions, and involvement from experts.
For example, one of our clients came to us because he wasn’t getting any new business even after spending a lot on Google Ads. Turns out, the ad was followed by next 3 links on negative reviews about his services from more than 3 years ago. We helped him get better visibility for his recent reviews which were all praises for his services. So getting expert help makes sense because experts have all the tools and experience to see the bigger picture and help you resolve a situation with minimal damage and best possible outcomes.