Doing e-commerce means you’ll deal with more customers. Including ones that may find your service not good enough despite all your hard work. And that also means you’ll likely deal with negative reviews stemming from their dissatisfaction.
As you may have been aware, customer reviews could heavily affect your business. Positive reviews result in good reputation, more trust from customers, and eventually bigger sales, whereas negative reviews do the opposite.
No matter how scathing and irritating those bad reviews are for you to read, the right thing you should do is respond to every single one of them. But of course you can’t just reply with a simple apology – or maybe an equally stinging clapback.
There are several things to pay attention to in order to deliver good responses that ease your customers’ frustration. What are they?
1. Respond as soon as possible
Once you get bad reviews, they should be your top priority no matter how busy you are. The faster you respond, the faster it is to get things right with your dissatisfied customer. Make sure you reach out to them within 24-48 hours after they posted their feedback online. The sooner your respond, the more genuine your words sound to them.
2. Acknowledge the inconvenience
You may feel like you’ve put your heart and soul into your work, but that doesn’t mean everyone should be satisfied with it. So it’s only natural for you to feel attacked and hurt when someone feels disappointed by your services or products. Still, you shouldn’t respond to their disappointment with an answer in which you seem to justify what has happened or even blame things on your customers.
Put yourself in your customers’ shoe so you can see what upsets them. Then, let them know you understand what’s bothering them. It may not immediately solve the problems, but that makes them feel heard and at worried less as both parties try to work things out.
3. Give proper explanation
People can make mistakes. That means you can too. And so can people that you work with or everyone that’s involved in your business. So when your customers complain about it, give them a proper explanation. Even if the errors seem to be inevitable or aren’t purely your mistakes, like slow shipping which became a problem recently in Indonesia due to the public activity restriction.
Instead of justifying the mistakes, explain what happened. Politely let your customers know where things went wrong. However, do it as necessary. Use the right words and try not to blame the situation on other people or parties, or else that would sound like an excuse.
4. Fix it
If possible, offer to correct your mistakes as soon as possible. Quickly offer a replacement, refund, or a compensation in the form of gift card, discounts, or free gift to comfort your dissatisfied customers. But that’s not the end of the problem. Learn from the mistakes and fix them to ensure the errors don’t happen again in the future.
Minimize the errors
No matter how good you are at responding to negative reviews, preventing the mistakes is always the best option. So, always ensure the quality of your products and tighten the quality controls to reduce the number of defects.
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