The time to deal with negative reviews is before they are ever posted.

99% of negative Google reviews will not be taken down. You need to be proactive.

Let’s talk about the two best ways to get ahead of negative reviews.

First, customer service then getting more customer reviews.

Provide Great Customer Service

That’s pretty obvious, but what does that look like? And how do you do it efficiently?

Here are four actionable processes you can put in place to improve your customers experience.

1. Listen to Your Customers

Never let feedback fall through the cracks.

Identify who at your organization is responsible for making sure every call, text and email from a customer gets a prompt and thoughtful response.

Most customers understand that businesses make mistakes.

However, they are much less understanding when a business fumbles an opportunity to fix their mistake.

A customer left in the dark is in the fast lane to a bad review.

2. Put Yourself in Your Customers Shoes

Don’t just rely on customer feedback to identify problems. Try to predict them before they happen.

Set a reminder for yourself to periodically look at your business from the customers perspective.

For maximum results get out of your usual workspace and do this where the customers are.

It will help you get out of your headspace and into theirs.

3. Employee Training

Make sure employees understand the company’s customer service goals and expectations.

After all, to customers, employees are the face of the company.

That face time will likely make the employee the most trusted contact at the company.

Have a clear process in place for employees to report critical feedback they receive from customers.

4. Learn From Feedback

There is no point in accepting feedback if it does not lead to change.

Businesses need to be open to the idea, and cost, of changing a process.

That’s right, change is not free. It requires time, effort and sometimes even a purchase.

If you are committed to improving start by having a central location for all customer feedback from around the company.

It can be difficult to detect trends and opportunities if the information is scattered amongst multiple individuals.

Collect Positive Reviews

Providing great customer service is like being focused and alert when driving. Collecting positive reviews is having car insurance.

Why It Matters

No matter how good your customer service is you have to accept the fact that you will eventually get a negative review.

That day may come when you finally find the unpleasable customer.

Or a negative review might pop up from an illegitimate source and stick.

As unfair as that is, it’s a scenario you need to be prepared for.

Building a large base of customer reviews is how you prepare.

How More Reviews Help

The impact of negative reviews goes down as the number of reviews goes up.

This graph illustrates the idea perfectly.

It shows how the impact of the negative review continues to be reduced as the number of reviews making up the original rating gets higher.

Let’s put that scenario into real world terms.

• Company A has a 4.5 rating on 5 reviews and they get a one star review. Company A’s new rating is 3.91

• Company B has a 4.5 rating on 20 reviews and they get a one star review. Company B’s new rating is 4.33

Company A’s rating dropped by over half a star from one negative review.

Company B’s only dropped by less than a quarter of a star.

Both companies started with the same rating, the difference was the number of reviews that made up the rating.

As we said off the top, the impact of negative reviews goes down as the number of reviews goes up.

By the time the rating is comprised of 50 reviews the impact from a one star review is a mere .02 on your overall rating.

What’s Next

You don’t have to think about your car insurance every day.

You buy it then forget about it.

At Simple Review Management we think protecting yourself from the impact of a negative review should be the same.

That’s why our review request software runs automatically.

Just set it and forget it, but it is working hard to get your company every hard earned review.

So if that one star review ever shows up, its impact will be dampened.