Major digital brands are prone to receiving a bad review from unsatisfied customers every once in a while. Though it might be your first instinct to delete unkind content, leaving a negative review online may be in your best interest.
Whether it’s a verified review or not, there are pros and cons to deleting them. Over the years, you’ll have several negative reviews connected to your brand. Learning how to deal with them properly will help your brand long-term.
These guidelines will give you a better understanding of approaching negative reviews. We’ll cover instances where you should remove negative reviews and others where it’s best to keep them.
Why You Should Remove Negative Reviews
With hundreds of millions of reviews left every year, it’s unlikely every single review left for your brand will be a glowing recommendation. It takes a lot of effort to manage and improve your services. Therefore, these comments can be discouraging.
Don’t let them slow you down, though. Have peace of mind knowing there’s always a solution to bad customer feedback. Every business receives its fair share of negative comments. Use them to grow and improve your brand!
At BRANDefenders, we help business owners and managers decide how to handle negative reviews. If it’s better to leave them online, we’ll explain why. However, there are other instances where it’s best to take them down.
Here are the advantages that come with removing negative reviews.
1. Maintain Customer Relations
Your company’s success lies in the hands of customers. You need to offer products and services that work for them. Therefore, a bad review can be detrimental to the success of your brand.
When you remove negative reviews, you’re instantly improving customer relations. How do you do this, though? One way is by reaching out to the customer and asking them to remove the comment. However, this isn’t always so easy.
At BRANDefenders, we’ll help navigate these situations. We have years of experience approaching negative feedback and helping companies before matters worsen. Our team understands how to diffuse such situations and find an agreement, even with the most unsettling customers.
Not to mention that these events are highly uncomfortable for employees.
2. Prevent Mistrust From Investors
The rise of social media makes it easier for customers to invade your businesses with negative reviews. In addition, this allows any user to access and share personal information about the company.
Your customer feedback will be on display for the world to see. This can leave you and your business in a vulnerable position. A bad reputation can affect client and investor trust. Word of mouth can be very effective in eroding a client’s trust in the future of a business. If word gets around, especially if it’s potentially fake or slanderous reviews, you may be blacklisted from future investment opportunities.
It’s impossible to know the customer’s identity every time a review is written. But, there may be times when a consumer is part of the competition. So, they could leave a negative review to knock out the other businesses in the area. If your response does not satisfy the consumer, it can be a failed endeavor for all other customers and businesses to see.
In these cases, other businesses can attempt to pull the rug out from under you by purposefully slandering your name. They can communicate with these customers and use your posted negative feedback to get your business. It’s important to remove these negative reviews before it’s too late.
3. Collect Market Research
It’s always important to regulate market research. It’s an essential part of understanding how your business profits and what impacts growth.
When you remove negative reviews, it can balance market research. Though the negative feedback may shed light on whether your business is running properly, unproductive negative reviews can skew analytics. You want to ensure that any feedback you receive is honest and accurate regarding the customer experience. Bots and dishonest customers can manipulate this research, interfering with this data.
You need control in this experiment to determine the right outcome. The non-productive negative feedback acts as an imbalance in this research. So, when collecting market research, you’ll need to have an even response with your feedback. If you don’t regulate bad negative reviews, your feedback may not be as beneficial.
4. Remove Trolls
Unfortunately, some people just want to watch the world burn. It’s true; a successful business can do everything to ensure a perfect experience and still fail to provide this service. But, sometimes, reviewers want to vent or attack businesses that are simply trying their best.
If the customer continues to hurl insults or negative opinions, you’ll need to continue forward and protect your brand. Sometimes, you may encounter abusive customers. This feedback is known as “trolling.” It involves a potentially dissatisfied customer engaging in abusive behavior for their enjoyment. Be wary of those customers that only wish to engage in unproductive and bitter behavior.
Other customers may agree with your need to remove the offender. In these cases, This will further build your engagement and community. So, even in the most offensive positions, your brand can succeed.
Why You Shouldn’t Remove Negative Reviews
You may think that there aren’t any disadvantages to removing negative reviews. However, this feedback can help your business grow and succeed.
Building a strategy to confront negative reviews is essential to improving customer service. These moments allow you to showcase the ways your management handles commitment to its customers, and you can better understand the aspects of your business that require improvement. When you remove complaints, you’re not addressing the issue.
Here are some disadvantages of deleting negative reviews:
1. Removing Them Could Lead to a Loss of Customers
If customers cannot leave feedback, they may take their business elsewhere. Their inability to comment may lead them to believe that you have bad business practices. It’s natural for a company to receive negative reviews occasionally. If your business has nothing but glowing comments, customers will be skeptical.
Moreover, customers see signs that a business is manipulating the review processing, encouraging distrust. It’s impossible to please everyone, and customers know this. Therefore, when a company has zero negative reviews, it raises red flags.
Besides, the goal of a successful business is to aid customers in making the best purchasing decisions. It’s your focus to serve the customer and provide a satisfactory business experience. If you’re following sound business practices and want your online presence to reflect that, services like those from the BRANDefenders can help.
2. Keeping Negative Reviews Builds Trust
Neglecting customer service may end up biting you in the end. Seeing how a business reacts to reviews is one way that potential customers may determine if your customer service is what they want. If customers notice that management is confronting the issue, they are more likely to shop in your store. If an obnoxious comment appears, they’ll want to see how the management team handles unruly customers.
In this case, other customers will respect a brand that maturely deals with unruly testimony. The enthusiastic feedback from the customer service team will show a fortified management team that can handle any emergency. For example, readers may see a post from a loyal customer who experienced an issue, making for a justified complaint. They will want to know that the loyal customer was treated well.
3. All Customer Reviews Are Redeemable
Even negative feedback is redeemable. Take the rest of the conversation offline. Try to request customer communication via their inbox. Give them time to rectify their comments and approach the underlying problem.
Through an open and honest conversation, you may be able to come to an agreement that inspires the reviewer to change their post. But even if it remains the same, responding professionally shows you being the bigger person and committed to honesty and open communication.
BRANDefenders assist you in understanding how to handle these events in a way that ultimately helps your brand. And once the management team solves the issue, the review may change to a 5-star positive review. Other customers will see that the once dissatisfied customer is now praising the brand. You will showcase an example of your reliable customer service.
To Remove or Not Remove Negative Reviews: That is the Question!
When you remove negative reviews, you risk losing your customer’s trust. Leaving feedback in the first place shows that the customer wishes to engage with the brand. Confidence is built when consumers can see other customers engaging with the brand.
They always say the customer is always right, but sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands to protect your business. Removing negative reviews can both help and inhibit the progress of your business.
Following these guidelines will help you develop more of an understanding of whether you should remove negative reviews. BRANDefenders can assist in handling such matters properly to keep your business in good standing.