When you own a business, you have people talking about it. Just like you may have a lot of appreciation, you may also get numerous negative customer reviews. Where positive social proofs may make your business while the negative reviews may just wreck havoc!

However, you need not panic when you see such reviews on your website or a social platform. You should instead look at it as an opportunity for making improvements in your business. Stay calm and try out the best strategies to tackle such negative social proofs.

Here’s all that you can try.

Leverage social monitoring tools:

In order to tackle negative customer reviews, you first need to know their whereabouts. That’s what social monitoring tools like Social Mention, Review Trackers etc. can help with. You can even set up Google Alerts for your business name so as to keep abreast with what people think about your business.

Do not remove any negative customer reviews:

Removing negative reviews from your site or other review sites would only infuriate the respective customer further. This would also put your business’s credibility in question. So, it’s better to accept that you may have some unhappy customers and work on winning their trust.

Empathize and apologize:

Once you find out a negative review do not panic. Instead, stay calm and convey that you deeply understand how the customer feels. Thereafter, take a few seconds to apologize even if you were not at fault. It’s not unfair being sorry for something that you didn’t do. Instead, it’s just a way of being apologetic for the way your customer feels.

Take the issue offline:

Once you’ve sincerely apologized online, take the entire issue offline. Reach out to the respective customer through email or phone. Get to know what made the customer put up a negative review. Listen carefully to what the customer says and try to identify their pain points.

Get to the root cause:

Now that you have known the entire issue, get to the root cause of the problem. Investigate and find out where it all started and accordingly make attempts to resolve the issue quickly. Further, ensure that your employees are empowered to do the same. Once the issue is resolved, do not sit back and relax. Follow up after the fact to ensure customer satisfaction.

Let your employees be aware of it:

Negative customer reviews can rather be taken as a motivation to get all your employees on their toes at once. Share the reviews with all your employees. This will help build a customer-centric mindset among employees and motivate them to work harder and be careful in future.

That’s how you handle negative customer reviews without letting them get on your nerves!