Crafting the perfect response to a negative review on Google and Facebook takes time. It’s not something that should be taken lightly. How you respond to a negative review will reflect on your business and whether people will want to spend their money with you.
These negative reviews are not an indictment against you, the person, but each review is about an experience at your business. You may be thinking – I should write this long, elaborate reply going into minute detail about your business, but I’m here to tell you that’s not the answer. A review response should never be long winded, save that type of content for a social media post or blog piece, if you write them. People reading review responses, including the person who initially left the review don’t want to read paragraph upon paragraph of verbiage.
The above is what not to do. No one on the internet is going to sit there and read a wall of text. Consumers don’t have the attention span, online, to read through walls of text. Writing a long reply with the thought that your response is providing education, informative, or otherwise necessary information is not the proper way to approach crafting that perfect response. A consumer is moving on from a response within two seconds.
Keep It Short & Simple.
Crafting that review response to a negative review should have two parts: an apology and an offer to discuss the situation further and the intent to rectify the situation. There is no need to add anything past that. Everything else is irrelevant to the matter at hand.
You want to show that you can handle a negative review objectively.If a reader gets the sense that your emotional or defensive in the response, it may dissuade them from spending their money at your business. Take a couple of days before you respond to a negative review, really assess the situation, and then begin crafting that response. And remember to keep it short and simple!
However, if you’re the type that has trouble separating yourself from your business when crafting those reviews, fret not. We’re here to help. We’ll help you craft that succinct and apologetic response that will get customers wanting to shop with you because of how you handled a negative review.