Complaints vs. Customer Reviews

Businesses must receive information about how their services or products impacting customers. Otherwise, how will they be able to grow or improve their business strategies? This is why every business offers customer support. This way, the businesses are giving a platform to the public to voice their opinion, their likes or dislikes. The information received from the customers may come in the form of customer reviews or complaints from unsatisfied customers. After gathering the data or information from the users, the business has to act on it as soon as possible to impact the customer’s experience positively.

Major Differences Between Customer Reviews and Complaints

Although both customer complaints and customer reviews serve the same purpose, there are major differences between them. In this section, we are going to reveal the differences that exist between them.

The business owner created the customer feedback section. On the other hand, customers make complaints on their own to voice their dissatisfaction of the product or service.

• Customers tend to write feedback with the purpose of letting them know what they liked or disliked and provide a suggestion on how can they improve their products or services. So it can be positive, negative or neutral. But complaints are always negative. They are made when the customer feels their needs are not met or heard.
• Complaints mostly results in preventative action. However, the review includes a suggestion which can turn out to be an opportunity for improvement.
• Feedbacks often come in the form of surveys. The businesses sometimes want customers to fill out a form with specific questions to learn about their experience. Further, this data is analysed to identify the trends or patterns

Businesses never have any control over the complaints. Customers may call, write or walk into a company to express their frustration or dissatisfaction for the product or services

• Business can structure the customer feedback as per the type of data they will require to improve their services, but when it comes to customer complaints, they will turn out how the customer makes them.

On either of the cases, you will require to answer to your customers to make them realise that their opinion on the products or services matters to you and you will do everything to look into the matter. If you allow the customer issues to go unresolved, there will be bigger problems that can negatively impact customer retention.

How should Business handle Customer Reviews and Complaints?

Reviews and complaints are something that is part of every business. Throughout the growth of your business, you will come across happy as well as disappointed customers. But if you want your business never to stop growing, expanding and improve, you will require to learn how to handle reviews and complaints of the customers. In this section, we will share some tips that will help you successfully manage negative and positive feedbacks from the customers

Here are a few of the tips:

1. Be quick to respond to negative reviews

You need to take care of negative reviews as soon as possible. A negative review that has not been acknowledged will look terrible as when other customers take that as the business or organisation do not care about customer’s feedback.

2 .Try appreciating the positive reviews

Along with negative reviews, you also need to reply the positive reviews by simply appreciating the customer for their positive response. It is up to you if you want to answer every positive review or just selective ones.

3. Avoid posting fake reviews

Posting fake reviews on your business or negative reviews about the competitors is considered to be unethical. Even asking friends and families to post positive reviews is considered illegal.

4. Always apologise and express sympathy

You must carefully decide who should monitor and respond to customer reviews and complaints. While you do that you need to make sure, he/she have a strong customer service attitude, and have a friendly writing style and must know how to handle negative reviews. You must have heard the phrase “the customer is always right”. While answering to a negative review, the person has to swallow their pride and give a sincere apology and express your empathy.

5. Encourage positive responses

The best way to do this is by encouraging happy customers to post positive reviews. You can leave comment cards on the store or add a ‘Review us now’ button on the website, which quickly takes the customer to the review site. Another way to do this is by introducing new services, offers or products. However, avoid sending mail to all your customers where you ask for them to post a positive review.

6. Offer compensation to the dissatisfied customers

When a customer leaves a negative review or complaint about your product or services, you can offer some form of compensation like a full refund, coupon codes for the next order, free product or services, discounted speaking or allowing them to speak to the management.

7. Respond to negative reviews publicly whenever possible

You would not want to give the impression to the potential customers that you are shying from your responsibility. So whenever possible, try responding to negative reviews publicly. However, there are problems that cannot be solved with knowing customer’s personal information. So you can just ask the customer publicly to privately send information of their order number, card number, contact number or whatever you may require.

Addressing customers’ feedbacks shows your sincerity and transparency of your services. As long as you keep the above tips in mind, you will have no trouble with managing customer feedback. If you need more tips like that, just consult experts from Topassingmentreviews.com.