You received a negative review online. Now what?
The best path forward is to respond to all of your reviews – negative and positive. Celebrate the positive, but then truthfully and respectfully respond to the negative reviewers.
If your staff blew it – say “we blew it, it was not our best day or how we want to serve our customers.” Others who read the review will appreciate that you are actively responding and stepping up to admit that you’re not perfect.
But if you’re in the right, it’s okay to set the record straight. There was a great example of this at a local restaurant on Father’s Day. The reviewer wrote a scathing one-star review because she had gone to brunch with her father, waited forever, the food was bad, and then one of the owners was incredibly rude to her. She went on and on, and was very negative.
The restaurant responded: “Why we gave a customer a zero-star review after they left us a one-star review. She should be ashamed of herself!” Then they described the video they had that showed how this customer was berating her father, complaining that he wasn’t giving her enough money, raising her voice and creating a scene. The co-owner asked her to turn it down because she was making the other customers uncomfortable. Eventually she left the restaurant, leaving her Dad to finish his meal by himself on Father’s Day.
Their firm response was met by 160 positive comments from their loyal customers!
The owner gave this update: “It appears she has deleted her review. Thanks to everyone that commented with kind words and support! We are more than capable of taking constructive criticism and do so all the time. But we will always defend ourselves when someone lies and twists the facts about what happened, especially when we can prove otherwise.”
This highlights the importance of what is known as “Social Listening.” You need to monitor what’s being said about you on the major social and search platforms. Negative comments can take off like a forest fire in a drought. With the anonymity of online posts, all sense of politeness and grace is gone and people will post terrible things that they would never say to you in person. Plus there’s a pile-on factor where the floodgates are open to complain about your restaurant. Someone might have experienced bad service on a visit five years ago, but they’ll share the story like it was yesterday.
A new restaurant opened in a small town near us recently. A diner complained on a local Facebook group about how they were treated one night. The restaurant was going to close early for a comedy show, and basically they rushed the diner through their dinner and out the door. They also had allegedly locked the front doors which was probably a fire code violation, so the comment section got riled up and the negative comments started flying. Clearly the owners had no idea this discussion was happening online, as after 100 comments they still hadn’t weighed in to explain the situation or offer an apology. This one unanswered rant might tank their whole dream of a successful restaurant, because they weren’t social listening.
There are some tools available to automate your online monitoring because clearly you have better things to do all day to operate your restaurant. You can start by setting up some Google alerts for the name of your restaurant. Google will email you a digest each day of every new thing they’ve found online that day for your alert term. You can create new alerts at: https://www.google.com/alerts
WHAT OTHERS SAY:
- Powerful Examples of How to Respond to Negative Reviews – ReviewTrackers.com
- Essential Steps to Handle Negative Reviews — SBA.gov
- Negative Customer Review? Turn It Into a Positive Opportunity – BusinessNewsDaily.com
