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Having a plan to handle negative customers giving you bad reviews can help you make mature decisions when the time comes.

Transcription

Embrace your bad reviews.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I’m going to talk about the scourge of the internet, especially for people in e-commerce of any sort, and that’s bad reviews.

What do you do about bad reviews?

I’m going to get to that in a second.

First, I want to remind you about my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

If you want to make it to where you have absolutely zero competition reviews or otherwise, then you’re going to want to check out this book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

This is how you can even keep Amazon.com from destroying your business, you get a free copy at, AmazonProofBook.com.

Now let’s talk about reviews. So this came up because I was really listening to a podcast that’s getting ready to interview that I did over at OffTheGridBiz.com it’s not up yet.

But it may be up by the time you’re watching this. It’s an interview with a lady in one of the things that she talks about that if she could change anything about her business, it was the idea of bad reviews.

And it’s not the first time I’ve heard it.

In fact, if you listen to other episodes of Off-the-Grid Biz, it’s a common issue.

And anybody that has an e-commerce business is going to just despise because all it takes is one, it takes one bad review, it takes one nasty customer, one interaction gone wrong for you to just look horrible to the rest of the internet.

Now there are ways to handle this, but the first thing you got to do is embrace it, you got to realize this is what it’s all about, okay?

It’s going to happen.

If you’re out there doing stuff, you are going to get bad reviews.

Now, how do you get over it?

You have to go straight at it.

First step is you have to respond wherever the interview wherever the reviews are. The bad review is, if it gives you a chance to respond, that is something you’ve got to do, you got to jump on it right away.

You’ve got to put yourself out there say I’m not sure quite what we’re what went wrong. Or we understand what went wrong, we want to fix it, we want to make it better for you. Or this is how we’re we’re going to keep this from happening again.

If you come back to us, we’ll give you this, this or this, you do everything you can even though the person’s a jerk, I understand that the person’s out to hurt you, I understand.

But if you can find a way to look good to the people that are reading it, then it doesn’t matter what they said.

If you say we’re going to fix everything, you know, well, yeah, but you killed my firstborn, and you did this.

I mean, just think the most horrible thing well okay, well, we will bring your firstborn back to life.

You have to go over and above and beyond to say that you’re going to fix it.

Especially if that person you know, there’s no way on God’s green earth that they’re going to allow you to fix it for them, even better.

You’ve got to come out as the one with a solid head on your shoulders, you don’t come out and say, Well, you did this and you did that and you lied and you so on so forth.

I don’t think that’s the best.

I’ve seen that happen. I’ve seen the excuse the language of the pissing contest going back and forth between the business owner or the business executive, and the person reviewing online, okay, don’t try and play that game.

Play the higher ground as best as possible, that’s the first step.

Get on there as quick as possible to add a comment and talk about how you’re going to fix the issue. Whether they go along with it or not, is irrelevant.

What matters is if somebody else is reading it, they see that you’re quick to respond and quick to fix whatever problem happened. That’s important.

Okay, the second thing, here’s another thing that you can do.

If you’re doing any form of content marketing whatsoever, I would highly recommend that you use bad reviews, especially the most vile ones, the ones where people just say the most absurd things. Take that and put it in your content.

Okay, if you’re doing a blog post, I want you to make a whole blog post about that one issue. And then you can go a little bit deeper. Well turns out that the real issue with this person is this, this, and this, but we understand.

See, you can be a little bit more open about all the details of the scenario. But in that situation, you also and this is only for lost causes.

This is for a person that you’ve already blocked and you’ve got a restraining order against them. That’s the person I’m talking about you, it’s already a dead deal, then you can go out, make it public, put it out there, but do it in your own way and always end on the higher ground.

Always say, Hey, no matter what we want to fix it for even if this person came back and apologize, we would fix it for them tomorrow, you have to keep the higher ground you have to, you have to show yourself as being better than the other person and not making it petty.

You laugh about it, you joke about if someone says something absurd, you say, I understand that this person believes that that happened.

But from our perspective, we didn’t see that happen. And so please come and join us.

If you have a situation even similar to this, I will bring you on my show, I will have you write an article for me, I will do you know, you use it as a challenge, use it as a way to make fun and have a good time with it.

Especially if you’ve got a troll out there that’s just messing with you a person that didn’t even buy from you, it’s probably a competitor, but they’re saying the nastiest things about you.

That’s okay, play with it a little bit. It’s not that big a deal, just as long as you don’t make it as serious as they’re making it.

As long as you don’t take them too seriously. And make it too over the top and get offended, just don’t get offended, stay on the side of reality and have a good time with it.

If you do that, if you handle it with an adult attitude, you’re going to be happy with the results. In the long run, people will see you as the adult in the room.

And that’s all that matters.

What matters is you know, he who laughs last you know what I’m saying.

So, hopefully, that makes sense.

When it comes to reviews, don’t make them everything, use them as an opportunity take them and use them as a learning situation, as something that you can discuss as something that you can throw out there.

And then the third thing I’m going to recommend you to make sure you have a process for getting good reviews. If there are 110 good reviews and one that isn’t good, you’re doing okay. All right.

Yeah, it’s gonna take away that perfect five-star rating you have and it’s gonna pull it down to five, four and a half stars or whatever. Don’t worry about it. It’s okay. It gives you that no matter what the product is on amazon.com is a perfect example.

You can look at any of the highest selling products, you will not find one of those products that are over 1000 reviews that don’t have a single negative review and single one-star review. They all have them.

They all have them because no matter what, someone’s not going to figure out that they’re holding the book upside down and they think it’s a foreign language that they bought, and, or whatever, you know, some absurd, crazy insanity, you can find it out there.

So it’s just part of the business.

What you got to do is take everything that most people would see as a negative, you flip it on its head into a positive. Hopefully, that’s helpful.

We’ll be back here tomorrow night with another idea of either a tactic, a strategy, or a principle that can help you explode your business. Go check out the free version of my book, AmazonProofBook.com, and we’ll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.