How to Deal With Negative Comments About Your Brand

HOW TO DEAL WITH NEGATIVE COMMENTS About your Brind ** No matter what kind of business you run, the potential of negative comments and bad customer reviews will always be present. The proliferation of social media, online review platforms and personal blogs mean that unhappy customers can quickly and easily share their opinion online. In this infographic, we look at some simple tips for dealing with negative online comments about your brand. Respond Quickly One of the most important elements to tackling a critical comment, particularly via social media, is to respond as quickly as possible. This ensures your audience knows you take customer services seriously, and that you're committed to helping unhappy customers. Of course, this means you must monitor social media and review sites for mentions of your brand wherever possible. Stay in the Channel Avoid the temptation to move the conversation off the channel where it was instigated. Your customers want to see transparency and honesty from your brand, so it's important to have the conversation in the same channel. You should also avoid deleting comments or parts of the conversation, instead focusing on being open and trying to rectify the situation. Try Put Things Right It's important that you do as much as you can to put the situation right, particularly if you're the one in the wrong. Go out of your way to show your customers that you're willing to listen to them, and that you will take steps to fix things when something goes wrong. Not only can this end with a happy customer, but your other customers can see how you dealt with things. If You're Wrong, Admit It Nobody likes being in the wrong, especially if you're being called on it in a public forum with a large audience. But everyone makes mistakes and it takes an open, honest brand to admit it and take responsibility. If you know you're in the wrong, accept it and apologise, then take steps to rectify things. This approach can often turn a negative situation into a positive one. Be Human How you respond to customers and negative comments will vary depending on your brand ethos and tone of voice, but in any case it's important to inject some personality into the situation. Try to avoid the typical, boiler-plate responses people expect - you want to come off as human and caring, not just a corporate machine that doesn't really care. Be Consistent It's important you don't change how you deal with customers and complaints across different channels. Your audience will pick up on this and it will backfire on you eventually. Keep in mind that you're not pretending to be open and honest - that should be the real goal. Stay consistent across all of your customer services channels, not just those in the public space. Remember the Audience Whether the customer is being unreasonable, someone is making baseless accusations or you're just getting more criticism than you're happy with, it can sometimes be difficult not to respond in a similarly negative manner. Just remember, lots of other people can see the conversation, so stay polite, professional and show that you're doing all you can to rectify things in a reasonable way. AWESOMERESOURCES www.awesomeresources.co.uk