Monitoring and responding to online reviews

online reviews

In this day and age, consumers have a powerful voice—especially online. This means that you can’t get away with bad service without expecting negative online reviews that can hurt your reputation. Unfortunately, even if you do the utmost to provide your customers with the best service or product possible, there’s a good chance you’ll get a bad review once in awhile. It’s how you react to those reviews that matters.

Monitoring Your Online Reviews

There are several user review websites that you should monitor. These include popular user review sites such as Yelp and Angie’s List as well as social media sites, like Google+, Twitter and Facebook. It’s important to include review monitoring in your social media strategy and set a schedule for monitoring on a daily or weekly basis. This way you can respond to any negative or positive reviews as promptly as possible. Other customers will see that you haven’t responded to negative feedback, so the longer you wait, the more it hurts your reputation.

Responding to Negative Reviews

Be transparent, deleting negative reviews can cause more backlash from customers. Develop a response protocol so that your team knows how to handle a negative review. Your response should move to take the conversation offline, offer to come up with a solution via email or phone. This shows that you care about addressing the customer’s feedback and many reviewers will follow up on their negative review by explaining your attempts to rectify the issue—something that customers will look on favorably. For reviews that are more nuanced you will also need to develop an approval process in place so that you can carefully review any responses that deserve an extra set of eyes.

Online customer reviews are not something you can ignore as they greatly impact your company’s reputation. Be sure to monitor your company’s online reviews and have a protocol in place for how to respond to and handle negative reviews. If you have questions about your review strategy contact us at Hodges Partnership for further advice today.

Amanda Colocho

Amanda joined Hodges in 2015 after earning her undergraduate degree in mass communications and public relations from VCU. Since then, she’s been flexing her media relations, content strategy and social media muscles on accounts like Virginia Distillery Company, Motorcycle Law Group, Hilldrup, Kroger, Virginia Outdoors Foundation and Swedish Match’s Umgås Magazine.

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