Receiving a bad review is never a good thing, right? Well one thing is for sure, it never feels good. In many cases, if your business receives a bad review it can feel like a personal attack! In addition, many people base their buying decisions on online reviews so a bad review can cost you money...so how can a negative review actually help your business? In short, it humanizes your company! Watch the video to see how you can turn bad reviews into new customers and we'll discuss specific tactics you can use today to get more 5-star reviews!
Video Transcription
Dave Martin (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Today, we're going to talk about how negative reviews can actually help your business, the benefits of negative reviews, and when you get a negative review, how should you respond to it? And lastly, how to get more positive reviews. If that sounds like something you'd like to learn, then stick around.
(00:23):
Dave Martin from Nettra Media. And yes, it's true, a bad review, a negative review could be a good thing for your business. But really, it's how you react and how you respond to it. Now, many business owners, they like to ignore bad reviews. They look at their reviews on Yelp or Google saying, "Well, if it's bad, those people aren't my real customers anyway. My real customers the one that have kept me in business for years. They'd all give me great reviews." That might be true, but the problem is all of your potential clients seeing those bad reviews are choosing not to call your company. And you're losing hundreds, if not thousands of dollars every month because of bad reviews. And the thing is, over 86% of people, they trust online reviews. Like it or not, in today's day and age, people like to look you up and see if they should give you business.
(01:24):
Now, back in, say, the '80s or the early '90s, if somebody referred a friend to your business, that's all it took. They'd open the Yellow Pages, they'd give you a call, you'd have a new client. But today, if somebody refers their friend or family to your business, that's not good enough anymore. They're going to look you up on Google or look you up on Yelp. And if they decide not to give you business, you're not going to know they made that decision. They're not going to call you up all of a sudden and say, "Hey, you know what? Somebody referred me to you, but your review on Yelp was so poor, I decided to go to your competitor." You're just none the wiser that you actually just lost a client. And actually, over 86% of people, it's been proven in various studies, they are swayed by both negative and positive reviews. And so, looking at the reviews you have and taking them seriously is the very first place to start.
(02:28):
So let me go ahead and give you an example or almost a horror story of how bad reviews can cost you literally thousands of dollars a month. And I'm going to obscure this particular attorney's name, but let's go ahead and take a look here at his Yelp page. Now, what you're going to see is that, out of five stars, he has a one star review. And as we scroll down this page, you're going to see there is many people saying, "I should've never called him. I wished I would've read Yelp." Really scathing reviews.
(03:10):
Sometimes people will leave a one star review and not give you any reason, or maybe they gave it for a different company and got you confused, and those sometimes you could disregard. But these are high quality negative reviews. And you'll see there's certain parts where the attorney is actually responding to them. But one of the responses in particular, they're trying to discredit Yelp by saying, "Well, Yelp actually only favors bad reviews," and things like that. And whether Yelp does or not, that's fine, but it really makes this person look small because the person that actually left the bad review, I'm sure they went to one of the many attorneys on Yelp with very positive reviews. So this is definitely not how you want your company to look on Yelp or on Google because, for this attorney, these bad reviews are costing him anywhere from 10 to $30,000 a month, especially because this particular attorney does a lot of advertising. And so, people are seeing this Yelp page every day.
(04:24):
What are the benefits of actually having a bad review? Well, the first is it helps to humanize your business. I mean, I'm sure we've all seen a business on Google or Yelp with 400 reviews or an obscene amount of reviews, and all of them are five stars. It almost makes you feel like, "Well, you probably have some kind of program in place, and somehow these aren't entirely real." Because here's the situation, if your company deals with the general public, you're going to deal with a jerk here or there. Your business could do a great job for them, but it's just never good enough, and that person is going to leave a review. So the first benefit of having a negative review is it allows you to showcase your customer service because you can respond back to that review and say, "So sorry for this," and really get in there and figure out what the issue was and encourage them to get back to you.
(05:27):
And the other benefit of having a negative review is that it shows your business has a pulse. So often you'll see businesses with a lot of, both good and bad reviews, but especially for the bad ones, they never reach out and they try to figure out and try and come up with a solution for the problem. And believe it or not, a lot of consumers that read reviews, they also take that into consideration.
(05:54):
So let's go ahead and cover the seven tips on how to respond to a negative review. Now, the first one is you do not want to use a canned response or the same response for every single negative review, because if somebody is reading all your negative reviews, let's say if you have a handful of them, and they see the exact same response, it makes you come across as being very inauthentic.
(06:21):
The next one is you do not want to be defensive. As I referenced with that attorney, how they started to try and discredit Yelp for these bad reviews, that's not a good road to go down, and you're never going to win business that way. So you never want to be defensive when you're responding to a bad online review.
(06:44):
The third tip is to make sure to address the customer's actual issue. We already talked about, you don't want to use the same canned or templated response because, of course, it makes you feel inauthentic, but you also don't want to be so general that you're tap dancing around the actual issue, the reason why your customer's leaving a bad review, because that also makes you seem inauthentic. Even though you took the time to write something specific for that person, it's best to address that issue and being proactive and solution-oriented with it.
(07:20):
The fourth thing to keep in mind is that you want to make sure to respond within seven days. I've seen so many Google and Yelp pages that have numerous reviews, both good and bad, and especially with the bad reviews, they haven't been responded to in years. And actually, the attorney on Yelp that I just referenced, if you looked back at some of those reviews they had, those had been bad reviews for years before they finally responded. And so, you want to make sure that you're very timely on both good and bad reviews to either thank them for the good review or figure out a way to be solution-oriented with a bad review.
(08:05):
The fifth tip for responding to a bad review is to have the business owner do it and not just some employee. I see this a lot, where a business gets a bad review and the business owner, because they're so busy, they say, "Well, hey, so and so can you respond to this?" In other words, they're not assigning the level of priority that it should have. Not really thinking this through, that hundreds if not thousands of people are going to see this response. So it's incredibly important that the business owner responds because especially it shows how much you really care about your business. And people that are looking in your reviews, both good and bad reviews, will then make their decision based on that.
(08:48):
The sixth tip is to run your response by somebody else before you send it. We've had a lot of clients in the past that read a bad review. And man, it sucks when you get a bad review because, in a sense, yes, it might be against your business, but it's really hard to not take it personal at some level. And so, you just want to justify yourself. And even if you've written it out and read it 10 times, then you just send it off, oftentimes, if a day goes by, you then look at it again and you might regret a couple things that you said in your response. And by then, it's too late. So what you want to do is, when you write out your response, send it to somebody that you think is very genuine, somebody that really understands the human dynamic of when somebody's is feeling wrong, they need to be righted, somebody that's sensitive like that. I would make sure to give that response to them. Say, "Hey, read this really quick. And do you think this really represents us and a great response to them? That treats them with dignity, but also positions us being solution-oriented. And the companies that do this, they see a much better return from these bad reviews actually creating business and new clients from them based on the responses.
(10:16):
My last tip in handling a negative review is to make the most of the feedback that you get. So often, a restaurant owner will get three or four reviews. So let's say they're green beans within one month and that everything was great, but those green beans, they were horrible. Well, many restaurant owners will just disregard that when actually they realize, "Well, we went with a new supplier for all of our produce, and this is the fourth review we've gotten about the green beans. Maybe we should switch out the green beans." So many businesses don't look at this feedback, whether good or bad, as an opportunity to improve. So make a ton of use from all the feedback that you're getting from your clients.
(11:02):
Okay, so hopefully by now, you understand that online reviews are very, very important, and that getting a bad review is not the end of the world. Actually, it's a way that you might be able to gain clients as long as you're proactively and respectfully getting back to them in a solution-oriented way.
(11:23):
Now, of course, if all you're getting are bad reviews, well that, of course, is an issue. And I'm sure you're going to be getting a lot more positive reviews than negative ones. So let's talk about ways of getting more positive reviews because the statistics show that people are 21% more likely to leave a bad review than a good review. Most of your clients, they would love to leave you a review if you just ask them. And that's the thing, most business owners never ask. And so, one of our favorite strategies that we've employed for many of our clients has resulted in some of our clients having over 300 reviews on Google, which is huge, not only for landing new clients, but also for SEO, search engine optimization. Google loves businesses that have had a ton of reviews, and they tend to rank those businesses higher in organic search rankings.
(12:20):
So, what exactly is this strategy? Well, it's taken us years to figure out how to help clients like this and scale it up. But what we've done, for an example, for a local personal injury attorney is we've worked with the attorney's staff that when a client, one of their clients comes in to get their check, they pass out a postcard. And on this postcard it says, "Did you like working with us? If so, leave us a review on Google. If you can't do that, leave us a review on Yelp." And we also created a second postcard, and this said, "If you liked our service, please leave us a review on Yelp. But if you haven't left at least five Yelp reviews, leave us a review on Facebook."
(13:08):
Now, the benefit of that is there are two separate postcards. One encouraging that Google Review, the other encouraging the Yelp review, and the person usually takes it from them and says, "Oh, yes, of course. I'm going to go ahead and leave your review when I get home." Well, what happens? Probably 99% of the time they didn't leave a review. So what our clients do is within three to four days, they call that client up and they say, "Hey, how's it going, so and so? It's Dave." And they'd say, "Hey, wow, Dave, what are you calling for? What's going on?" "Oh, just want to see how things are going. That was a big case. It's finally over with. How are you feeling? How are you doing?" "Oh, I'm doing Good." "Okay, great. Hey, by the way, I know we gave you that postcard for the Google Review. Have you by chance had a time to fill that out yet?" "Oh, no. I'm so sorry, man. I meant to, I've just got so busy." Okay, no problem. I can go ahead and walk you through how to do it right now." That is how many of our clients have gotten hundreds of reviews on both Google and Facebook.
(14:22):
And when you think about it from Google's perspective, you're doing the hard work for them. Google is looking for businesses when somebody searches for personal injury attorney, well, you're trying to show Google if you're a personal injury attorney, that you are the best search result for that. So if you've gone to the trouble of getting hundreds of reviews within Google about your business, that shows Google that you are a relevant search result for those searches, and that's how you get more clicks. On top of that, you're talking about a hundreds of online reviews. And what's so important about this is its digital word of mouth.
(15:04):
Word of mouth will always be the most effective form of advertising there ever will be because people trust what their friends, and family, and even coworkers say about a business, much more than what the business says about themself. So not only is getting a lot of online reviews, both good and even some bad, very helpful, but it shows people that they could build trust and trust that, wow, this really looks like a good company. And a nice side note is that Google loves when you've got hundreds of reviews because you are showing Google that you are relevant search result for whatever service or product that you're selling. So you actually will climb up Google ranks by having more positive reviews.
(15:54):
So I hope that you're not scared of getting bad online reviews. Actually, I hope that you're proactive and not only thanking people for good reviews, but also coming up with a strategy on how to answer specifically every bad review that you get. And you're going to see that you're going to get more business because of a strategy like this in place. Thanks.
