Everybody is prone to receive a negative review from a dissatisfied customer whether righteous or wrong.
As long as you’re operating, you’re going to be making mistakes. Still, a negative review on Zomato let’s say or on social media hits you hard in the head.
Especially nowadays where people are only ordering food.
They receive their order late, food is cold, wrong order, you name it.
The easiest thing to do is to hold the phones and post a negative review of their experience.
Ignoring your customers’ reviews is the biggest mistake to be done whether the review was negative or positive, you have to show interest and respond.
A Harvard Business Review study shows that responding to customers’ reviews whether positive or negative improves ratings.
Why do you need to care about rating?
Because there is a correlation between higher ratings and increased revenues.
The study performed by Michael Anderson and Jeremy Magruder, professors at the University of California, Berkeley,found that if the rating improved by one star, the actual revenue will increase by 5 to 9%.
Not only this, but the study found that visitors’ decision in choosing a restaurant is highly affected by how many reviews this restaurant has.
So while you’re trying to avoid negative reviews, you have to push customers to write positive ones since 72% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust businesses more.
How to respond to negative reviews
Acknowledge and thank them
First of all, show sympathy with the consumer even you don’t really think you’ve done anything wrong.
Social media platforms are not the correct place to prove you’re right even when you are.
Acknowledging that there is a mistake somewhere goes a long way toward calming an angry customer.
Thank them for their review because it helps you improve your services and shows a real interest in your restaurant.
An example might look like this:
“we thank you for your feedback and we totally understand your frustration…”
Apologize and take it offline
Again, even if you think you didn’t do anything wrong or the mistake was not intended.
Apologize to show consumers you feel sorry for their bad experience.
But don’t go beyond this online. Rather, invite them to contact you privately by sending you an email to further understand the situation.
Don’t try to solve the issue online with back and forth responses.
Plus you don’t want to expose further negative details when the customer replies again.
Provide them with an email address or a phone number that usually receives customer complaints to solve the issue.
Let them know clearly that you want to fix the problem.
No matter what, be calm
You better wait 24 hours before responding to a negative review.
The customer has cooled off, you gave yourself time to think thoroughly about an appropriate response especially if the customer was really rude in his review or at least he wasn’t objective at all.
Here is an example to totally avoid in your responses.
