How to respond to online reviews

The Digital Marketing Podcast with Mandar Marathe

If you might have see that there are a lot of websites that review your business. For example you have Google My Business which lists you on Maps or you have Bing Places. People can visit your listings and review your business. If you are a restaurant, people can review you on Zomato. If you are a spa, you would have a listing on Trip Advisor or a listing website like Just Dial or Sulekha. People might go and review your business on these sites. So how do you actually tackle these reviews online?

Monitor brand presence: You need to make a list of all websites where your brand has been mentioned or a list of websites where your company profile has been created. Lets say you have Google My Business, Trip Advisor, Bing Places, Just Dial, Sulekha, Zomato. Keep a track of all the listings of your business across these sites in a spreadsheet. Every week pull up this sheet and check whether there are new reviews that have come in on the company profiles.

If you have received a good review, then you should definitely pat yourself on your back. But, if its a bad review or negative review, you need to take cognizance of it. Lets say you have a company profile on Glassdoor and people have negatively reviewed your company there, what should you do? I would say that you should welcome and embrace negative reviews. Its the negative reviews that will help you do better with your business. Someone who writes positively about your business, then there is no scope of improvement for your business. But if someone speaks negatively about your business - about your company culture, the service you provide, your customer service interactions - its an opportunity to improve that area of your business.

Categorize negative reviews: Make a note of all negative reviews you have received across all different platforms and try to categorize these negative reviews to understand whether the negative review is related to your service or is it related to people who work in your organization or the negative review has to do with you as a founder of the company. You should definitely categorize these negative reviews and put them in different buckets and focus on the bucket that has the most negative reviews. Try to improve your service. If you observe, the products that you prefer to buy on Amazon are the one's that have received the most positive reviews. You always go through reviews on Amazon or Flipkart before you buy the product. Amazon's algorithm also takes into consideration the reviews and ratings that people have put in for your products.

Respond to reviews: Make sure you are responding to the reviews received on such platforms. If its a dissatisfied customer for a product that they have received, then promise to your customer that you will send the right product. Try to appease the customer by doing a little bit beyond what's promised. Make him comfortable by responding to the negative reviews. Take these negative reviews positively - Treat negative reviews as bugs in your system and log them into your project management system. Become a better company by resolving these bugs.