It’s bound to happen.
Sometimes, no matter what we do or how above and beyond our services go, we’ll get a bad review. Maybe the customer is having a bad day and just can’t be pleased; whatever the reason, it’s hard not to see that review as an injustice.
After all, you work hard to maintain a high rating on Google, Facebook, Yelp, or wherever you stake your reputation. A single negative review can affect your overall rating, depending on how many reviews you’ve earned. Inc. Magazine reported that the weight of a single negative review requires 40 positive reviews to balance it out.
So, what do you do when someone gives you a 1-star rating or a bad review?
Tactic #1: Make Things Right Privately
If the bad review is genuine (i.e., from an actual customer and not a mistake), the best way to neutralize a bad review is to communicate with them privately to make things right. Not only is it excellent customer service, but it also makes it likely that the person will take down their review or amend the rating.
People want to be understood. Most bad reviewers aren’t giving you a low rating to hurt your business or even to warn other customers; they’re doing it to be heard. By reaching out privately, it’s even possible that you can turn a negative review into a positive one.
It should be easy for customers to connect with your company, which is a crucial part of a positive experience. Easy, natural communication is one of the functions we built into the Scorpion Communications Suite. By giving you the option to text or email a customer, you can reach out to them the way they prefer, which starts you off on the right foot.
Tactic #2: Respond to Your Audience, Not the Review
If they refuse to amend their review (or the review is from someone who was never a customer), your next option is a public reply. A BrightLocal poll shows that 89% of customers read how businesses respond to reviews. Podium found that how a business responded mattered to 56% of customers.
But here’s something to remember: how you respond to a bad review is essential, but not for the reason you think it is.
Customers read review responses because they want to know that your company is reasonable, trustworthy, and empathetic. A review thread isn’t a courtroom—arguing your case against a negative review isn’t going to convince future customers that you’re in the right (even though you are in the right). All they’ll take away from your response is that if they have a problem, you’ll argue with them instead of seeking a solution.
So, write your response like you’re demonstrating to a future customer how you’d treat them in a dispute. Be warm, understanding, and willing to accommodate. Offer to make things right, even if the reviewer is being unfair. Studies show that people take negative reviews seriously, but the warmer and more understanding you are, the more unreasonably hostile the bad review looks.
Given how essential review responses are to winning over future customers, it should be as simple and easy as possible for plumbers to manage their reviews. That’s why we put a review management dashboard into the Scorpion Reputation Suite. Plumbing businesses can connect all their review profiles to a single app, making it possible to check for bad reviews, draft a response, and send it off without leaving the app.
Tactic #3: Make Your Reputation Bulletproof
One of the rules of the Internet: customers will listen to negative reviews more than positive ones.
Why? Negative reviews are less common, so scarcity makes them appear more meaningful. Another factor is that people are wary of fake positive reviews, so negative reviews (to them) seem more honest and accurate. Yet another reason is that people want to know what they’re getting into when they work with a new business, and negative reviews give them a sense of what to expect.
The best way to counteract negative reviews is through volume and authenticity.
Increasing Review Volume
Volume is simple—the more positive reviews you have, the less impact a negative review will have on your overall rating. A 1-star review when you have 3 reviews is a bad look; a few 1-star reviews when you have 100 reviews is negligible. If hundreds of positive ratings outweigh your negative reviews, it’ll be clear that negative customer experiences are the exception, not the norm.
However, it’s also about recency. A hundred reviews from six months ago matter less than the 1-star review you got yesterday. A BrightLocal survey found that 85% of customers don’t care about reviews older than 3 months, and 40% only care about reviews from the last 2 weeks. So you don’t just need to accrue a lot of positive reviews then call it a day; you need to generate a consistent stream of reviews, so you always have a high volume of recent 4- or 5-star ratings.
Improving Review Authenticity
On top of that, your positive reviews need to feel genuine. Anyone can write a positive review, and customers know that. What are markers of authenticity? Part of it goes back to volume—that’s why customers typically don’t even believe a business’ Google or Yelp rating until it has over 40 reviews. It’s easy to fake a handful of positive reviews, but once you get to 80, 90, or 300 reviews, customers know you’re the real deal.
But the other part of authenticity is specificity: are they giving shout-outs to specific techs? Are they giving descriptions of actual problems? Are they posting photos or videos of your handiwork? Surveys show that 65% of customers trust reviews written by a real customer—reviews with photos, videos, or specific descriptions.
So, how do plumbers generate a high volume of authentic positive reviews?
The traditional way is asking—70% of people will leave a review when asked. To streamline that task, we built an automated review requester into the Scorpion Reputation Suite. When a job is finished or an invoice is paid, the system automatically asks your customer to leave a review. Boom—there’s your stream of authentic reviews, ready to go.
Conclusion (& Why a Negative Review or Two Is Good for Business)
As you can see, plenty of options are available to manage negative reviews.
But we also want to point out something interesting about customer psychology: a negative review every once in a while is a good thing. Customers are sharp; they know that a perfect, 5-star rating for any business is too good to be true. PowerReviews found that a perfect 5-star rating communicates inexperience (or worse) to 82% of customers.
The sweet spot for customers isn’t a 5.0 rating—it’s somewhere between a 4.0 and 4.8 rating. An overwhelming majority of positive reviews look more credible when there are a handful of negative reviews in there.
Negative reviews are bound to happen, that’s true. But you don’t have to be at the mercy of a negative reviewer. You can take it as an opportunity to make things right for that particular customer, or you can take it as an opportunity to show future customers that you’re empathetic, understanding, and solutions-focused.
In either case, the most important thing for you is to create a system for requesting reviews early and often, generating new reviews weekly to make your reputation as strong as possible. That’s the single best way to deal with a negative review. All it takes is asking!
