Help! I Got A One-Star Review
This week on Marketing Monday, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will share with you3 simple ways on how to handle a one-star review
Help! I’ve got a one-star review.
Tell me you’ve never had that. I hope you haven’t. Now, I wrote an article recently where I dubbed 2017 the year of the one-star review. I had more calls from clients last year than any previous year saying “Help! I’ve got a one-star Google review”
The first thing that I want you to do to really help protect yourself from this situation or at least if it does happen you’ll be ready, is to get your Google My Business password. Google My Business is where the reviews go.
Now, as a case in point, usually what happens is your Google My Business page is hooked up to usually a Gmail account. What happens so often when we take over a client’s account, we get access to their Google My Business page for various reasons and they go, can’t find it or don’t know how to access it.
Don’t let that be you because there are more and more one-star reviews around and if you don’t have the capacity to be able to respond to them, you’re going to need this.
I can tell you with some of our clients, that is literally taking weeks and even months to get that. So how long do you want a one-star negative review to sit on your Google My Business page, on your Google profile? That’s what people see when they look up your business.
Do yourself a favour, figure out what the password is. It’ll be a Gmail account linked to the Google My Business page, print that out and stick it in your safe or put it somewhere safe because so many of our clients we take over don’t know how to access it and this can be disastrous. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is in terms of how you respond to the one-star review and unless it’s a complete raving loony which occasionally happens, what I’d suggest is you use what I called the “Sandwich Technique”
Basically what happens with the sandwich technique is you do a smiley face, a not necessarily negative and then followed by a smiley face. People are looking to see how you respond.
There will be a number of instances where you are going to get a one-star review and you have no idea who it’s from and you don’t even know if it’s a client of yours. So you start with something positive. “Hey Jimmy”, “I’m really sorry to hear you didn’t have a good experience”.
Then you can say something like “Look, from our records, we can’t actually tell if you’re a client of this practice. We’re wondering whether maybe you’ve got the wrong practice.” Sow the seeds of doubt there if you can and then finish it off with, “But we really want to help you, so please give us a call.” “We’ll see what we can do.”
That’s the sandwich technique for responding.
Now the final thing, which is absolutely critical as part of it is about building your reviews. If you’ve got 150 reviews like a dentist I saw this morning in Melbourne, if a one-star review comes in, it’s not game over. It’s frustrating of course, you should make sure you’ve got your password and respond generally using that technique, but where this can be really disastrous is if you’ve only got one review or none.
I came across a client, this was a few years ago when we were early in our business and we just couldn’t understand why things weren’t working well for them online. Then we discovered the only review they had was a one-star review, train wreck.
So build your reviews. It forms as a kind of insurance against this. You can use that to respond and make sure you get access, because I can tell you a lot of practices don’t have it and when this crisis happens (and it is increasingly happening) you want to be prepared.