.png)
It’s time for a perspective shift—negative customer service reviews can actually be extremely beneficial to business owners.
It’s tempting to feel disheartened or dismissive of critical feedback. But it can provide a wealth of valuable insight for improving your business. With appropriate management, it can help your customers understand services and offerings. Likewise, it can often become a compass for you to learn how your business impacts customers. Plus, shifting your perspective from a negative customer service review to a positive growth experience will help you in the long run.
Whether customer service reviews are positive or negative, you can still utilize them to your advantage. Let’s discuss how this feedback affects your business and how to address your customers after you receive a critical review. Most importantly, we’ll dive into how you can strengthen your business strategy from these customer service reviews.
Negative reviews are bound to happen. Every business will encounter some form of critical feedback eventually. A lapse can lead to dissatisfaction even when you are committed to providing excellent customer service and exceptional products.
It’s not easy to receive critical feedback. Sometimes, we’re stunned and wonder why it’s happened. In a surprising survey, 49% of customers shared their poor experience with a business.
Specifically, there are several reasons why your customer might leave you a negative review:
According to several sources, it can require anywhere from 10 to 40 positive reviews to counteract the damage done by a single negative review. The severity of the feedback does play a role, but it can still cause damage over time—especially if it’s left with no response.
To list, there are several effects poor reviews can have on your business:
Additionally, the shock of receiving poor feedback from a customer might cause several emotions to bubble to the surface. You might be concerned with these effects, or wonder why someone would say something so negative. Those initial feelings are valid—but stepping back and shifting your perspective is vital for long-term business growth.
The glimmer of hope here is that a bad review isn’t the end of the world. In fact, they can be more beneficial than you think. Instead of seeing a poor customer service review as a setback, frame this experience as a unique opportunity to make your business look good. Plus, the feedback gives you insights into your customer's needs and preferences and can uncover concerns you were unaware of.
As we’ve said, critical reviews provide some surprisingly powerful benefits that can help your business. Here are just a few of them:
With the inevitability of poor customer service reviews, moving forward with a healthy perspective and a proactive approach is essential. Before you respond to a review, it’s important to get your attitude straight so you can leverage the data it provides. There are several negative situations that can be turned into positive growth opportunities.
If you receive poor customer service reviews relating to CX concerns, it might be time to evaluate your CX strategy. These insights will allow you to address concerns, craft a plan to improve, and reevaluate your business strategy. Reviewing all feedback lets you pinpoint shared concerns and good practices among your customers.
There are several ways to gather and review your feedback—including simple spreadsheets, programs, and organizations specializing in customer data. Once your facts are organized, you should have a bigger picture of the concerns in need of improvement.
From there, you’ll be able to create a strategy with goals to refine your products or services in question. It’s crucial to ensure you stay on track with your plan so you can accurately track your progress. Going forward, it’s a good idea to continually evaluate your CX strategy with customer surveys or review requests to stay on top of your new changes.
Customer service reviews can also guide you and your team in resolving issues you might not know about. Your business identity is closely linked to your brand, so upholding the integrity of your image is vital to long-term success. With that in mind, if customer feedback has revealed an issue within your team, it might help to evaluate your staffing and training processes.
Several steps can be taken to strengthen training techniques. It could be as simple as incorporating empathy and problem-solving skill-building into your education. Alternatively, you might offer high-level seminars on de-escalation training and incorporate refresher courses on the job.
Finally, gather feedback from employees to understand their needs, specifically whether they feel comfortable with their skills or need more guidance. It’s a good idea to have an open-door policy for team members who seek to express their needs or concerns.
Another benefit of customer service reviews is they give you insights into additional business operations. Customers might reveal a poor experience with your workflow, such as billing or shipping, that you might have overlooked. Additionally, there may be other delays that might require you to look into using other suppliers.
Similarly, you might discover website or app issues on a customer's specific device that you hadn’t encountered. Learning more about their issue can help you track down the problem and create a solution for all platforms and devices. As you move forward, you might create a process for testing that covers more platforms so that any updates don’t cause further issues.
In this way, you’ll be able to ensure smooth business operations and give your customers an enjoyable experience.
Finally, some poor customer service reviews might focus on your messaging, marketing, or presentation of your products or services. It’s extremely important to ensure that your communications and information are clear and accurate. Otherwise, you risk customer churn or a tarnished reputation, which is difficult—and often expensive—to overcome.
When you commit to remedy communication problems or misunderstandings, be careful when writing your responses. Enlist the help of others to review the follow-up messaging to ensure that your response is clear and concise. As you go forward, consider implementing a quality assurance (QA) process to verify the accuracy of your communications.
With all these growth opportunities, it’s so important that you publicly resolve concerns or share your commitment to improving your processes. Acknowledge your customers' concerns correctly—and do so quickly. Ignoring critical feedback is not ideal if you’re trying to build a business that will flourish. They will also not go away on their own. Instead, you have to be proactive and respond.
Your response should be professional, on-brand, and completed in just a few easy steps:
The greatest thing about responding to customer service reviews is that it builds trust. Not only can it help improve your business’s relationship with the reviewer, but other customers will see your efforts and respect you for it.
It’s important to note that not all negative feedback left for your business is accurate and meant to be taken seriously. With that said, you must learn to distinguish between constructive and destructive feedback. While it may take some serious thought, here’s how you can determine what type of review you’ve received:
Constructive feedback aims to help improve products, services, or performance. The delivery is usually respectful and balanced with positive feedback. These comments are focused on finding genuine solutions to the customer’s problem.
Destructive feedback is often very critical and used to vent frustration about the situation. The delivery is usually harsh, harmful, or even a personal attack. Instead of asking for solutions, they’re typically vague and overly abrasive, purposefully inhibiting your business’s growth opportunities.
Depending on the platform, it could be possible to report destructive comments to the administrators. Some comments violate guidelines and policies, so conduct research to understand your rights.
Customer service reviews hold immense value for your business, whether they’re good or bad. Positive reviews highlight what you’re doing well, while negative reviews offer a roadmap for areas of improvement.
Instead of fearing criticism, take a proactive approach by embracing these tools for growth. By responding to feedback, creating a plan to improve your processes, and sharing your efforts with customers, you strengthen your reputation and ensure long-term success. Ultimately, by leveraging all customer feedback, you’ll be able to build a solid CX strategy.
.svg){kind=icon}
