Uncomplicate – How to handle negative reviews
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
Companies constantly seek reviews of their products and services. They seek validation from their customers and peers, and proactively engage with customers to get their reviews and feedback on the different aspects of the product and services they provide.
Reviews of any kind are extremely useful pieces of information for companies. Among other things, customer reviews help companies shape their products and guide them on the direction the company should take. You can watch this video for some quick tips on how to use customers reviews as a growth lever.
Positive reviews are great, but how does one deal with negative ones? Negative reviews expose the vulnerabilities in your brand, make your shortcomings public, and give your competitors a platform and opportinuty to put you down.
We sat down with Vinay Bhagat, CEO of TrustRadius to talk about how to deal with negative reviews. Here are the highlights:
Democratise reviews
Make sure your presence on all review platforms is representative of a broad range of views, and is not just dominated by a handful of negative reviews. This is where the volume of reviews will come into the picture, says Vinay.
It’s critical to have hundreds of reviews so that the one or two negative reviews look like outliers and not like the norm. So, it is worth exploring tactics that will help you drive reviews. (Watch this space for details on how to go about doing this.)
Be specific with your ask
One way to completely minimise negative reviews is to be specific with your asks. In a crowded market place, it’s very difficult for customers to differentiate between marketing messages from different companies. So, getting information from review platforms, about things like alternate products, recommendations, specific use cases, etc. help users evaluate the positives and negatives and take balanced decisions. Very few platforms like TrustRadius help you get a 360 degree view of these reviews.
Acknowledge and engage
In addition to getting users to write reviews, it is important for brands to acknowledge and engage with users who give feedback and post reviews on these platforms, Vinay adds.
“What we’ve learned in our research is that companies who not only listen to that commentary, but engage and tell the customer that they hearing them, ultimately win,” he says.
