We’ve all heard the saying "a parent is only as happy as their unhappiest child". Well, the same can be said for our least satisfied customer and our business. As business owners, we want our clients to be happy and love the services we provide. What happens, though, when we find ourselves faced with a negative review or even worse, multiple unhappy customers? It’s time to turn the situation around. How can we find the positives in the negatives and use it to make our companies better?

Listen to What They Are Saying

Truly listen and think about the validity of what our customers are telling us. What are they unhappy about? Is it the quality of our work? Is it our communication with them? Being defensive and denying there could be any truth to their comments will not help. We make mistakes. That’s ok, but it's what we do when we make mistakes that will determine whether we are in business long term or for the short term. Once a review is online, it is there to stay. Most future customers will see it and it may play a part in their decision to hire us or not. How we make these situations right with our customers, is very important!

Look For Ways We Can Improve

If we receive a negative review on social media or in written form, let the customer know we are concerned about their happiness and that we will be in touch. Then, immediately reach out to them. Find out in detail what happened. If the quality of the work is not up to standards, arrange to fix it quickly. If we haven't been good about communicating with them, apologize sincerely and find out how we can make things right with them. The more we can find out about what we did wrong, the more we can make changes to ensure it does not happen again. We may need to do some extra training with some of our workers or even ourselves. We may need to work on some practices that are making our customers feel we aren't being considerate. Whatever it is, this negative review can help us to get better. Once we’ve made things right with our customers, they are more likely to return to their review and change it or write a follow-up to it. Our customers don't expect perfection but they do expect honesty, accountability, and hard work.

Learn From These Experiences

That first 1-star rating will sting. Especially since it's written online for the world to see. Hopefully, we remember that feeling and it motivates us to put new practices in place. We’ve just been given valuable feedback! Mistakes can be costly to our companies which is a good reason to learn from our errors. If we look at those unhappy customers as critical to our growth and success, we will truly appreciate what they’ve done for us. Without customers who are willing to speak up, we may continue to provide sub-par services. These customers won't come back, and even worse, they will tell others. So let us continue to learn from our customers and be grateful for even our most unhappy clients.