Reviews play an important role for a shop’s reputation and can potentially drive sales. Interestingly enough, even a negative comment can be turned to your advantage. For more details about handling negative reviews on Flowwow, please keep reading this article.
Where can I find the ‘Reviews’ section on Flowwow?
To view customer reviews, go to your shop’s profile in your Personal area → ‘More sections’ → ‘Reviews’.
Sellers can respond to reviews, publicly thank customers, collect feedback, and demonstrate customer focus and service levels to a wider target audience.
What makes customers leave a negative review?
Negative reviews may be a consequence of bad customer experience when Sellers actually made a mistake — for example, failed to comply with a customer's preferences. However, real life is full of other scenarios. Sometimes a customer may leave a negative review without good reason, undermining your statistics and rating. First, let’s consider the first case when negative reviews are justifie.
1. Replacement of goods
When shopping, customers expect to receive items that look exactly as advertised. If it turns out that the actual item differs from its photos in the product card, then the customer's expectations will not be met.
2. Late delivery
When buying something online, customers expect their order to be delivered as soon as possible and on time. This is one of the main advantages of quick commerce. Therefore, customers are dissatisfied when an order is late.
3. Changes to orders without prior approval
Please do not make any changes to orders unless explicitly asked to do so by the customer following their approval. For example, a customer ordered from you a cake with pink icing, but you didn’t have that one in stock, and you decided to replace it with red icing without informing the customer about the change in advance. When the order is delivered, the customer’s expectations will not be met, and you will receive a negative review. The best way out of this situation is to inform the customer that pink icing is not currently available and offer an alternative for their order. When approved by the customer, you can proceed with the change.
4. Breach of confidentiality
Disclosure of order details to third parties. For example, a gentleman ordered a gift for his girlfriend, preferring to remain anonymous, but you revealed his name to her. The surprise failed, and the customer was dissatisfied.
5. Delivery issues
Delivery issues, including the performance of couriers, also may objectively affect customer reviews. This is especially true if an order is damaged during delivery (for example, a cake was crushed; flowers wilted or froze). Customers have the right to mention such defects and express their dissatisfaction in their review.
How to effectively handle negative reviews
The main reason for a negative review is that expectations were not met. For example, when viewing a product card, the customer had the impression that the bouquet was huge and beautiful, but the actual bouquet delivered turned out to be a medium-sized arrangement.
If you consider that a negative review was published without good reason, you can report it to Flowwow. To do so, go to the web version of your Flowwow Seller personal area and click the flag icon next to a review you consider to be unjustified. We will consider your case and get back to you with a response as soon as possible. However, remember that you shouldn’t report all negative reviews. Rather, please consider responding to negative reviews to get positive feedback later.
So, how do you respond to a negative review?
- Before responding to any comment, you need to make sure you are in a positive frame of mind so as not to take your anger out on the customer.
- Secondly, you should find out what the problem is and what happened. This is necessary to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
- Customers want to rest assured that you consider their problem to be the most important one in the world. Show that you care, too. This will make the customer feel that they are heard, understood and that you sincerely want to help them.
- Prepare several response scenarios for resolving issues with orders. Remember that customers need quick (timely) solutions right here and right now.
- Draw your own conclusions. Try to answer the following questions for yourself. What was my mistake? How can I avoid such mistakes in the future? What needs to be done to prevent this from happening again?
Your Ultimate Checklist for Handling Negative Reviews
Below you will find a checklist for responding to negative reviews based on all our recommendations.
Step #1. Make sure you are in a positive frame of mind — peace, love, and positive feelings.
Step #2. Remember the special tone of voice in communication and importance of the customer’s problem.
Step #3. Find out what the problem is and what went wrong.
Step #4. Accept the situation.
Step #5. Develop and offer a solution to the customer.
Step #6. Deliver on your promise.
Step #7. Draw conclusions.
How does it work? Example.
Let’s consider that you have received a review like this:
Here's how you can respond to a comment like this:
In the correct response scenario, we can see that the Seller sympathises with the customer, shares their emotions, and does not keep silent about them. Then the Seller demonstrates a sincere desire to understand what happened, and in the end, they offer a solution to the situation that is currently developing.
Apart from the loss of dignity and an exchange of insults, when responding to customer comments, you should not use scripted canned responses, automatic responses, or chatbots — each customer has their unique issue. However, at the same time, you may want to develop several response scenarios to manage various issues: replace an item, offer a discount, or something else.
Conclusions.
Of course, every Seller wants their shop to have only positive reviews, but sometimes items with only positive reviews may make customers suspicious — what if all these are fake reviews? Only negative reviews may affect your shop’s rating on Flowwow, leading to a decrease in sales, a lower position on the search results page.
Therefore, we recommend maintaining a balance — it’s okay for a product card to have both positive and negative reviews. Apart from that, negative reviews will help you understand your growth points, improve your product, make it unique and the most popular with customers — all based on customer feedback.
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