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Online Reputation Management Part Two
Why You Need to Respond to Negative Reviews A single negative review can do surprising damage to any business. Even if you have only one negative review among thousands of positive ones, the way that most review sites work means that there's nothing stopping that single bad review from being brought to the top of the pile. In fact, if you're on Amazon for instance, there is actually a system in place to ensure that both the best and worst review of the bunch get shown. And while one bad review might not seem like the end of the world, this really depends very much on the content of said review. If you were reading reviews of a television and they were all really good except for one that said the TV exploded and killed their family… would you still buy the television? That's an extreme example but it does show how one review can be devastating. What to Do Of course you can't do anything about the fact that you will get bad reviews. Even the best product or service in the world will occasionally fail to meet expectations and then there's nothing you can do (ethically) to prevent people from seeing that. What you can do though is to leave a response that will rectify matters to some degree. This will you will be able to put forward your side of the story while at the same time demonstrating that you care and that you want to help. Perhaps this will mean that you offer a free replacement for a damaged product, or maybe it will just be an apology – either way, this can often be enough to put a prospective customer's mind at ease so that they at least know there's someone listening who is keen to ensure you get the best possible service and experience. It's crucial here though to ensure that you respond the correct way. In many cases it might be that the fault was not with your product but rather with the way that the user was interacting with it. In such cases you might be tempted to point that out but you should always make sure to do so in such a way that you don't seem like you're making excuses for yourself. Similarly, while you want to offer compensation, you don't want to go overboard in case all your future customers then expect the same.