To make good use of customer feedback for your business, you need to encourage your customers to write reviews and be critical for you to respond to reviews. Typically, when customers write a product or service review on your website or some other platform, they are very frank and honest. If they do not plan to be honest, they will not waste time and energy to give you a review. That’s why your internal, as well as external, response to the reviews plays a crucial role in determining whether you are making productive use of the review system or not.
No matter how short a review is, you can make it valuable and constructive by the way you respond to reviews. Even if you keep quiet and do not write a reply to a detailed review, that’s also a kind of response. Unfortunately, it is not much of a good answer.
Customers do not always expect a response from you on the reviews they write on your website. Still, they definitely do expect you to take some practical action, especially if the review they write is negative. A negative review is a complaint and needs to be taken seriously. Too many complaints about your products or services can potentially harm your sales.
Today we will be discussing how to respond to reviews. Since a review can be categorized as either positive or negative, we will first talk about how to respond to positive reviews and how to respond to negative reviews.
How to Respond to Positive Reviews
The way you respond to reviews that are positive should depend on the kind of review your customer has given. There are many kinds of positive reviews, and each type has a constructive way of responding to it.
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1. A Thank You Review
This is the simplest form of a review. Responding to positive reviews that are merely saying thanks or expressing gratefulness for your service could either be a simple welcome message or something more beneficial for your business.
When a customer offers thanks after buying your product or service, they are happy with the product or service quality. They liked what they received in exchange for their money and will carry around a positive impression about your brand. If you tell them that they are welcome, your response would be appropriate but not sufficient to give more benefit to your business.
The way to respond to reviews that offer thanks more constructively is to remind or offer something to the customer that entices them to come back later and buy from you again. Welcoming them and informing them about your upcoming sale is one way of doing this.
Doing this increases the chances of increasing your average customer lifetime value. It is more cost-effective to maintain your existing customers than to gain new customers for any business.
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2. A Suggestion Review
Sometimes, a customer might feel comfortable communicating with you after making their purchase because they are happy with the kind of customer service. In this comfort, they might want to contribute an idea for your business.
Successful entrepreneurs are those who positively take these kinds of suggestions. These are not the kind of suggestions that are made from a place of criticism or frustration. These are suggestions made out of sincerity and the customer’s own creativity.
If you consider these suggestions seriously, you might even be able to develop
new product ideas or determine that you need a product line extension.
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The proper way of responding to positive reviews that include a suggestion is acknowledging that you have received the suggestion. Thank the customer and advise that you consider the ideas and implement them if they are feasible for your business.
3. Review About Good Customer Service
To respond to reviews praising your customer support staff and their service, you need to first know who among your team served that particular customer. Next, thank the customer for praising your service. Tell them that you are glad they liked your service and that you hope to serve them in the same way in the future.
On the other side, it is also essential that you reward the staff who served this customer one way or the other. It does not necessarily have to be a monetary reward, such as a higher commission on that particular sale. Still, it can also be something as simple as praising the salesperson verbally in front of all their colleagues.
Good customer service should always be encouraged. If any of your salesmen routinely please your customers through good service during their buying process, taking care of that salesman will help you maintain a high level of sales for your business. The more customers they serve and please, the more chances you will get to respond to reviews that are full of praise about your customer service.
How to Respond to Negative Reviews
Above, we learned how to respond to positive reviews. Now let’s talk about responding to negative reviews.
To constructively respond to reviews that are negative, you need to have a bigger heart and not take comments from customers too personally. If you start getting offended every time a customer posts a negative review about your brand name or service, things will not work out very much in your favor. You need to see the situation from your customer’s perspective and resolve it accordingly.
1. Complaint About Product Quality
This is the most common type of negative review that you might get for your products. If your customer is not happy with the quality of the product they bought from you, they will most likely complain about it. These complaints can be detrimental to your business, especially if they are posted publicly. Therefore, knowing how to handle this situation and respond to reviews like this is important.
Before responding to negative reviews like this, you need to get hold of your company’s terms of service, exchange policy, and refund policy. If you can see that the customer’s complaint is legit and the item they bought is really defective, take responsibility for the mistake on your part, and offer them to exchange the item or return it and claim a refund.
However, if you see that the item’s quality is okay and the customer’s complaint is not reasonable, try to negotiate with the customer another way. Either way, the end result that you want is to make the customer happy and stop spreading negative word about your business.
2. Complaint About Your Customer Service
To respond to reviews complaining about your customer service, you first need to check with your customer support staff. It is never a good idea to bash any of your staff without gathering all the facts.
The complaint could be about pre-purchase or post-purchase customer service. Either way, if the customer is upset about the service, you need to take responsibility and train your staff to attend to your customers more helpfully and decently.
For example, some customers don’t like to be interrupted when checking out the goods at a retail store. Others need more help in finding and picking the items that they need at the store. Your customer support staff or sales staff should observe which customer feels more comfortable and serve them accordingly. Training your staff properly for this is your job.
The best way to respond to reviews or complaints like this is to apologize to the customer and inform them that you will ensure they don’t have to go through a similar experience at your outlet again.
Showing Product Reviews on Your Strikingly Website
These were the ways to respond to reviews that were either positive or negative. If you usually receive more positive than negative reviews, displaying these reviews on your website can be very useful.
If you build your website on Strikingly, you can request your customers to write reviews on your products and decide which ones to display on the site. This feature, however, is currently only available for our Pro users and above.
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To enable product reviews from your Strikingly editor, take the following steps.
- Select ‘Store’ from the left panel.
- Select ‘Product Reviews’.
- Click on the button ‘Enable Product Reviews’.
- The system will be triggered to send an email to the customer 7 days after their order is completed, requesting them to write a review.
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If you want to have product reviews displayed and respond to reviews on your website, you can create a website on Strikingly and get started.
Many of our users are running an online store or ecommerce website on Strikingly. Our store templates are responsive, easy to navigate, and simple to use. If you have any queries about our website building tools and features, you can contact us anytime through the live chat support available 24/7 on our landing page. We wish you success and prosperity in your business pursuits.
