Bad reviews – should you respond?

It is never nice receiving a bad review online, and with the ever-increasing platforms that a customer can now write a review on, it has become more and more difficult to manage.

So, respond, ignore or delete?

As a rule of thumb we suggest that it is best to try your best to respond to all of your rev can, but of course you will not be able to do this all the time. It is wise to take each review case by case to ensure you are addressing the problem and taking on board any constructive feedback. For those who are unsure of how to respond, we have created a few handy tips to help you manage your reviews:

Tip 1:

Create a few scenario responses ­ if you have a few draft responses readily made, you can easily tailor these to your customer review and personalise to them. These will save time and allow you to ensure you have your brand voice portrayed in the response with your rules, regulations etc.

Tip 2: Get the information from the source

Find out from your staff what happened in the situation, refer to the response and gain as much information as possible – it is important to understand the incident and how your staff responded to it to ensure you have all the facts and information together before responding blind to the review.

Tip 3: Direct the conversation offline

If the review is bad and looks as though your response, as well written out as it can be will just further anger a customer it’s best to take the conversation offline, ask for the customer to call you direct or email you and provide the details.

Tip 4: Keep it professional

There is nothing worse than reading a hotel managers angry response to a customer – keep it professional, use your revised drafts, don’t take it personally, this will never look good and can reflect badly on the hotel brand.

We hope these handy tips will help you to tackle the vast platforms of reviews online and save you time when doing so!