How To Deal With Negative Reviews: Five Things to Consider

If you’re a business owner in 2014, it’s doubtful that you’ve not been affected by online reviews – whether positively, negatively, or both. Even if you’ve received overwhelmingly positive reviews and ratings online, it’s important to realize that no business is immune from negative reviews, including false and defamatory postings.

If no business is immune, how do you deal with negative reviews?

It’s important to develop a strategy or overall game plan. But bear in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all approach; rather, the best solutions are very fact-dependent.

Here are five things to consider, including techniques, when you’re faced with negative online reviews:

1. Directly responding to reviews

In many situations, you may wish to take the issue offline and prevent a public dialogue that could draw more attention.  This is easiest when you have or can obtain the reviewer’s phone number.

Alternatively, one option is to draft a response and ask the author to contact the company to resolve the situation.  The effectiveness of this depends on the specific website.  On Ripoff Report, for example, your best shot is simply filing a rebuttal and hoping it gets approved for posting.

On the other hand, Yelp allows business owners to create their own accounts, which makes it easy to interact with customers and monitor your business listings.  Beyond that, earlier this summer, Yelp announced customers can send direct private messages to business owners.  Of course, the ball will be in the customer’s court, but at least there is another method for actual dialogue to address legitimate customer complaints.

When contacting a reviewer online – whether publicly or privately – there are a number of ways to address the particular situation.  And certainly the response should be personal and unique to that particular situation, rather than recycling a canned response.

But in any response, you should avoid saying anything that could result in the problem becoming worse.  Though not coming off sounding defensive doesn’t mean you can’t highlight your company’s positives or strengths.

2. The carrot and stick approach

Remember, the customer typically has more leverage.  Thus, in many cases it may be necessary to concede or reach a compromise, depending, of course, on what the customer has said or may be threatening.

When talking with customers who have posted negative reviews or have threatened to do so, we often recommend offering a “carrot” – such as a free product or discount.  This often results in a happy customer, and possibly an updated review (or even removal of the original).

Alternatively, we often recommend the “stick,” which we usually label to refer to a cease and desist letter. If the negative review is false – perhaps not even written by a legitimate customer, but someone with ulterior motives – you can send a legal cease and desist letter.

These letters, especially with attached complaints showing your intentions to potentially file lawsuits, are effective when there are strong legal grounds.  Thus, you must ensure there are such strong legal grounds, or you may face a PR nightmare.

A couple months back, I mentioned a New York business that faced this very situation: the business’s attorney sent a demand letter threatening a defamation lawsuit in response to a Yelp review, which only worsened the problem.  The letter went viral and the business took a major hit on Yelp, as well as in search results as online stories began appearing on the first page of Google.

3. Lawsuits

In some situations, filing a lawsuit may be the optimal solution, such as when it’s clear that the author of a review is not a legitimate customer, but perhaps a competitor or ex-business partner.

In these cases, it’s often possible to get reviews removed from the internet, as well as to recover damages. Damages may be difficult to prove, but many U.S. jurisdictions recognize “per se” defamation, where damages may be presumed when defamatory remarks injure a party in its trade or profession. Furthermore, if a competitor posts false reviews, there is a federal statute under which you can recover profits and attorney fees.

Note: Any lawsuit you file generally must be brought against the actual author of a review, and not the third party website hosting the forum where the harmful statements were made.

4. Identifying Anonymous Posters

As an attorney, we frequently issue legal subpoenas to third party websites or companies to unmask anonymous reviewers.  Generally speaking, while these often do not yield legitimate names or contact information, if an IP Address is produced, that information can be used to subpoena the internet service provider for subscriber information.

Additionally, cyber investigators have techniques that can be used to unmask a poster’s identity.  However, if your company has an attorney, he or she must ensure the cyber investigator is not “pretexting,” or employing some techniquethat could create ethical issues for the attorney.

5. Choosing the Right Solution

As stated, there is no one-size-fits-all approach.  There are numerous factors to consider, such as available legal claims, removal options, the client’s budget, the statute of limitations, and more.  Choosing the best solution often requires a balancing of harm against the cost of response, the risk of making your situation worse, and your actual likelihood of success.

Best approach when one size does not fit all

We often recommend using outside consultants – so not only an attorney, a PR firm, or a cyber investigator, for example, but perhaps a combination of those various experts. Using this approach, each expert can bring its own “tool” to the table, rather than a professional only trying to utilize his or her techniques when there may be better alternatives.

In short, negative reviews can be very harmful and they are being increasingly relied upon by consumers. Therefore, with the state of the internet and social media, you cannot afford to ignore negative or possibly fake harmful reviews. When faced with negative reviews, a good place to start is in considering these 5 techniques.

Photo credit: Carrot and stick – Wikipedia