6 Tips for Responding to Negative Online Reviews

Nobody is immune to negative online reviews. You should respond to them quickly and thoughtfully.

In customer service, the goal is always to make everyone happy. But in reality, that’s nearly impossible.

Negative guest or customer experiences are inevitable. And unfortunately, unhappy guests are almost guaranteed to share their experience online — probably on your official review sites for thousands of people to see.

Hopefully, these reviews are few and far between. But when they do happen to your business, there are some best practices you should keep in mind. If you go about your response swiftly and gracefully, you might even turn an unhappy guest into a happy one.

What to do

It’s not easy to respond to negative reviews. You shouldn’t have the attitude that any response is better than none at all. If not handled gracefully, a bad response can do even more damage for your business.

So when you’re responding, try to incorporate these elements or think about them beforehand.

Prepare template responses

A template response can help make the response process faster and come across as more professional and organized.

Your template response shouldn’t be something you can copy and paste into every negative response without any editing. You should be able to customize it to the person you’re responding to. This shows them you actually read about and understood their criticism.

Have a few different templates prepared. Even if you customize your responses, using the same overall template or guide may come off as ingenuine.

Offer them a way to contact you

Your response should let the customer or guest know that you’re available to talk and help in any way that you can.

Leaving them your contact information lets them know you’re willing to resolve their problem and take more meaningful action. If you leave contact information, make sure it’s to a direct phone number or email of yours. Simply leading them to your business’ main line may leave them having to explain their issue all over again to someone new — leaving them even more frustrated.

Make sure that you respond if they do actually reach out to you. This may seem like a given, but emails or voicemails can fall through the cracks. Look out for their issue and make it a point to give them the attention you promised them.

Go the extra mile

If you can, go the extra mile and reach out to the guest or customer (if you have their information) on your own accord.

After a negative response, a customer seeing a discount or refund when they weren’t expecting one can boost their image of you — despite their experience. This will, of course, vary case by case. But if you’re committed to making things right, especially when you’re in the wrong, people will be more forgiving.

What not to do

Responding to negative reviews gracefully isn’t just about knowing what to do — it’s also about knowing what to avoid.

If you stay away from these bad practices, you can craft better responses to negative reviews.

Ignore negative reviews

Don’t ignore your negative reviews — especially if you’re actively responding to positive ones. This gives people the impression  that you’re purposefully evading negative criticism.

Follow the tips above to help you craft a thoughtful response to negative reviews. People leave reviews because they want to be heard. Responding to them is the very least you could do, especially if they were left upset because of things in your staff’s control.

Do it half-heartedly

Your responses don’t necessarily need to be lengthy, but they do need to be substantive.

A half-hearted response may look like this: “We’re sorry about your experience. We’ll try to do better next time.” Understandably, most people wouldn’t find this response satisfying — and neither would potential guests or customers reading that.

Creating templates that allow you elaborate on why the issue happened and what you’re doing to fix it can help you avoid responses that seem apathetic.

Forget to take responsibility

Regardless of whether the issue was in your control, the tone in your response should be apologetic.

You wouldn’t want to imply in any way that it was the reviewer’s fault that they had a negative experience. To avoid that implication or any other confusion, you should state in no unclear terms how sorry you are for what happened — and take full responsibility.