How small businesses are fighting back against malicious bad reviews

When opening a retail store, one of the most important things you consider in order to grow your brand is customer feedback. Your customers are the ones that are buying your products and paying for your services, so it makes sense to listen to them so that you can improve your business. Unfortunately, not all reviews are constructive and some of them can be malicious.

Small businesses tend to have a hard time fighting back against malicious reviews. After all, they don’t have any kind of legal team or specialists to help them. They’re just a small business and there’s little they can do. Luckily, most companies don’t need a legal team or any kind of specialist to help them overcome the problems associated with malicious bad reviews.

Photo by Jisun Han on Unsplash

What’s the impact of a negative review?

First, let’s examine the impact of a negative review.

• Negative reviews can drive customers away because most people will look at a business on Google before they decide to do business with them.
• This can ultimately lead to loss of revenue and will also undermine the business’s existing reputation. This results in fewer customers and makes it difficult for you to continue running your business.
• Poor reviews can also lead to a bad search engine ranking. Now if someone searches for your business or a business like yours, you’re less likely to show up on the rankings.

As you can see, negative reviews have a major impact on businesses and this problem is compounded if you’re a small company. Since you can’t really focus on fighting back against these reviews while running your business, you just have to take it and hope that something is done about it.

Fortunately, there might be a way for you to fight back against malicious reviews.

How are small businesses fighting back against negative reviews?

Small businesses are starting to take it into their own hands. They’re tired and frustrated with malicious reviews from people that might have not even been to their establishment, so here’s what they’re doing to counteract it.

• Developing strategies to remove negative reviews. There are actually a number of ways to get negative reviews removed, but you’ll actually need to contact the platform (such as Google or Yelp) to contest them.
  
• Working with specialist services to remove them. Companies like Removify can remove some bad Yelp reviews, especially if they’re purposely malicious. You simply contact them and they’ll help you remove reviews for a price. They typically work with platforms such as Yelp to ensure that those reviewers are flagged so they don’t have the power to make reviews in the future.
  
• Responding to the negative reviews for everyone to see. A lot of people have wised up to malicious reviews. These days, store owners are more than happy to respond to negative reviews for everyone to see. That way, other people can see that the negative review was malicious and that the store owner is being professional in dealing with it.
• Leaving them alone for the platform to deal with. Lastly, some people are just leaving the reviews up on the platform. If it’s very clear that the review is malicious, other people will report it or the platform will notice it and get rid of it.

Understanding the difference between critics and malicious reviews

It’s important to understand that there is a difference between your critics and malicious reviews. Some reviews will be harsh but if the customer has discussed everything that they had a problem with, it’s your job to be professional about it and approach them with a positive mindset. Fix the issues that they spoke about or respond to them if there was a misunderstanding. Either way, it’s your job to ensure a great customer experience and if they didn’t have one, then there’s a lot that you can learn from their criticism.

In some cases, they might return to your store and then amend their old review. If you show that you’re willing to go the extra mile to please customers, even ones that have left low-star reviews, then it’ll help your business in the long run.

Embrace the reality of unfair reviews

Unfortunately, unfair and malicious reviews are going to appear from time to time and there’s little you can do about it. You just need to embrace the fact that they’ll appear. Prepare some defences against it and fight back in your own way instead of just letting them stay up on platforms like Yelp and Google.