It’s time to talk about negative reviews again. It’s been a while since I last approached this topic, and while my thoughts on how to handle negative reviews haven’t changed, they have expanded.
My 2026 customer service and customer experience research found that 84 per cent of customers look at ratings and reviews before making a purchase.
Daniel Vivarelli, the founder of Starloop, has made an entire business of helping companies build their reputation through Google reviews.
He compares having the most and best reviews to being in high school, where people are drawn to the most popular students.
Getting two or three times as many reviews as competitors makes a company much more likely to win new customers. Vivarelli says, “This is a simple way for smaller businesses to compete with bigger names.”?
Another important finding in our research is that when it comes to negative reviews, nearly a third of customers (31 per cent) say they won’t make a purchase from a company that doesn’t have a negative review. In other words, perfection is not reality.
Before we go further, I want to emphasise that it’s important for a company to respond to all reviews, not just negative ones.
Adam Alfia, the CEO of Realtime Feedback, says, “If a customer tells you in person they love you, would you not say anything, turn your back on them and walk away?”
When your customer takes the time to give you a high rating and leave a positive review, thank them.
But don’t stop with a generic “thank you.” Personalise your response with a brief comment that shows you’ve read what they wrote.
Now, let’s jump over to negative reviews. Assuming most of your reviews are positive, with just a few negative ones, you have an incredible opportunity based on how you respond.
This is an opportunity to prove how good you are, not because you are perfect, but because of how you fix what’s not perfect.
My son and I were shopping for an engagement ring when we found a jeweller we loved. As we were doing our ‘due diligence’, the jeweller said, “Check out my Google reviews. Most are five stars but pay attention to the ones that aren’t.”
He was referring to a few one-star reviews. What impressed us wasn’t the actual reviews but his responses to them. He thanked his happy customers and quickly responded to the unhappy ones, promising to make things right. Follow-up comments from customers confirmed he did exactly that.
It wasn’t the positive reviews that made us want to do business with the jeweller. It was how he handled the negative ones.?
Customers don’t judge companies by whether they make mistakes. They judge them by how they respond. Sometimes the most powerful marketing message isn’t found in a five-star review. It’s found in a one-star review that was handled the right way.
Need a Reasonable Department?
A Reasonable Department is a customer service mindset that empowers employees to use judgment, empathy, and common sense when a customer’s situation falls outside of standard policies or procedures.
Most companies have standard operating procedures for just about everything. That’s good!
Processes create consistency, efficiency and predictability. But what happens when a customer’s situation doesn’t fit into the process?
Most customer interactions are routine. Self-service customer support, sometimes fuelled by AI, and well-trained employees can handle the routine questions and problems efficiently.
But every company eventually has a situation or issue that doesn’t neatly fit into a policy operations manual.
Maybe it’s a customer who has a unique circumstance. Maybe a process breaks down. Sometimes, following the rules could create a terrible customer experience.
To handle these situations, consider the following framework.
Detect: Recognise when an issue falls outside of the norm.
Route: Be sure to send the problem to the person or department with the right expertise to handle it.
Resolve: This is where employees get to use their judgment rather than trying to follow rules for something that falls outside the norm.
Learn: Every unusual situation is an opportunity to learn and improve.
Ask why it happened, how to handle it if it happens again, and whether the problem can be prevented from
happening in the future.
Customers rarely remember the transactions that went exactly as they were supposed to, but they almost always remember how you handled the situations that didn’t.
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