Can I delete negative online reviews of my business?
Online negative ratings, comments and reviews are an unavoidable risk of any business or organisation. It has been proven time and time again that dissatisfied customers and clients are more than likely to share their experience rather than customers who had a good to great experience. But what should you do when you receive one?
Online negative ratings, comments and reviews are an unavoidable risk of any business or organisation. It has been proven time and time again that dissatisfied customers and clients are more than likely to share their experience rather than customers who had a good to great experience.
Because of this, it is important that we take as many precautions as we can to ensure that bad reviews don’t deteriorate the entire perception and reputation of our business. But what's the best way to deal with a negative online review?
Unfortunately, dealing with negative reviews will almost always negatively impact the business unless you are able to negotiate with the reviewer and they change their review or you transparently deal with the user on a way that generates good publicity on your social media account.
Should you delete negative online reviews? No, but there are best practices to counter them.
Below are different ways to deal with negative reviews left on a Facebook business page (some of these are also applicable to other review sites, but we'll deal with each one specifically in another post):
1. Report the review from as many different Facebook users as possible (although if the review doesn’t contain racist remarks or hate speech, rude language, sexually explicit language, threatening, violent or suicidal language, or describes buying or selling drugs, guns or adult products, or is a clear violation of your trademark / IP, there’s little chance Facebook will remove it). To report a review, click the arrow in the upper right hand corner and click Report post.
2. Contact the user and ask her to remove it: Sometimes if you can address the person’s problem, you can convince them to remove it
3. Drown it out: Flush your page with more positive reviews from happy clients. Encourage other happy customers to post reviews.
4. Incentivise Reviews: This is only recommended if done ethically. During the sales process have your customer service representatives encourage positive online reviews from all new customers. Perhaps you may offer a service or discount in exchange for a review that's been posted to your Facebook page (or other review sites). It is important to maintain that the review is still the opinion of the customer but on completion of review (negative or positive) that they will receive a bonus. Because this is good practice of adding value to the transaction the review will most likely have a positive sway.
5. Remove all reviews: This is more of a nuclear option, and we still believe that some reviews are better than no reviews. However, Facebook now gives business pages the option of removing all reviews. Once you're logged in as a page admin, proceed to Manage Tabs, find "Reviews" and find the "Off" slider. Next, go to Settings, click Reviews, and in edit turn the setting to "Disable Reviews".
Business reputation can die by the hand of a scorned customer on social media. As it stands, review systems can be easily flawed with non-customers being able to leave reviews. This can lead to businesses with poor service having a positive overall rating and business with good service experiencing one unhappy customer who then spams the page with bad reviews. Buyer beware, if you are unsure or want to double check, you can normally tell an honest review by looking at the reviewer’s profile. If they leave multiple reviews for lots of different business they are usually authentic. If they have only ever bothered to leave one review, and it’s for the business you are looking at, it is probably incentivised (biasedly) or false. The final and most important piece of advice for businesses to maintain online reviews: Invest in good customer service.
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