Dealing with Negative Reviews (GoNerdify experience)

Nerdify has always had plenty of happy customers who were grateful to both the Nerds and customer support. They have been giving sincere thankful reviews during the conversations on Facebook or while texting. Recently Nerdify started receiving a lot more love through Facebook reviews too. It feels good to be appreciated, but understanding how to deal with criticism is of paramount importance.

A lot of review sites point out that negative reviews make up only a small portion of all reviews posted. To be more specific, 93% of Nerdify (gonerdify.com) users review their experience as positive. And if you’re curious about the negative reviews, those take up slightly above 2% of all the reviewers leaving the remaining 5% to neutral. Nonetheless, negative reviews should not be overlooked under any circumstances. At Nerdify we teach our customer support to always put customer first. I believe, that only with this state of mind you can successfully deal with negative reviews. You have to be willing to go above and beyond every problem behind every review to make things right. Whatever the case, proactively react to the review and provide solutions, making it into an example of a stellar customer support.

It’s a fact, that negative reviews have a potential of causing a lot of trouble unless managed wisely. Scoring an unresolved bad review is the last thing that you want for your service. In my experience, after putting all the efforts into research and launch of Nerdify, receiving first poor reviews felt like a slap in the face. Not to mention the first-time dealing with reviews when Nerdify launched on Facebook. Yet, negative reviews are inevitable for any business and properly handling them is something that every business has to do.

I’ve learned that when you represent a service (e.g. Nerdify), the best thing you can do is reach out to the client who left a negative review. Be professional when you approach the situation and use it as an opportunity to gather invaluable customer feedback. Customer feedback triggered by the negative reviews turned out to be priceless for Nerdify. It provided insights that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to notice. Moreover, it’s not only about gaining insight, but applying it and improving the service. The whole team behind Nerdify understands that and cherishes both customer feedback and reviews. In a nutshell, you should ask the reviewer for more feedback instead of jumping to any kind of conclusions.

Don’t sweat it if your service receives a few poor reviews, just make sure you handle them on a short notice. Remember that people who check review sites and look up your business on social media don’t expect your reviews to be perfect. Take needed measures at all times to make it right and show everybody that you care about your customers.