Deleting Bad Reviews is Risky for Your Business Because it Can Lead to More Bad Reviews, Broken Trust, or Something Far Worse
It’s every business owner’s worst nightmare – a bad review. Maybe you had a customer that, no matter what you did, it wasn’t good enough or maybe one of your employees was just having a bad day and something went wrong. Whatever the reason, you now have a one-star review on your profile.
As tempting as it is, deleting that one bad review can result in an even worse situation. In addition to avoiding making a bad situation worse, you can actually learn a lot from a bad review as well. Knowing the risks of deleting a bad review and the benefits of keeping it can help your business stay on top.
The Risks of Deleting Negative Reviews
Another Bad Review
Deleting a customer’s review after they are already unhappy with your service or product is like pouring fuel on flames. The customer is likely going to feel irritated and angry that you deleted, in their mind, a review that highlighted an important issue. This might even persuade them to go write another review even more scathing than the first.
In addition to another bad review, the customer might feel the need to go add that bad review on every platform they can find. Customer revenge is not an unheard-of event. The last thing you want is 20 bad reviews because you tried to get rid of one.
Your Company Can be Perceived as Fake
Your customers are smart cookies. When you have all perfect reviews, your potential customers might start getting suspicious. That’s right, customers expect to see a few two- and three-star reviews because no person, or company, is perfect
Having a flawless five-star score with only positive reviews will only alert your customers that you are hiding the problems by deleting reviews you don’t like. The result of potential customers not trusting you? No purchases.
Discourage People to Leave Reviews
When customers know you’re deleting reviews, they’ll be less likely to leave one themselves, positive or not. Your review gathering days can quickly become a thing of the past once customers catch onto your game. After all, why take the time to write something if it’s just going to be deleted?
While it may not sound like a problem if you have a good rating, it actually is. Current reviews are important in letting customers know what to expect from your business now and not six months ago. Believe it or not, customers not only look at “most helpful” reviews but also “most current.” Continually gathering reviews can be more difficult when people don’t think it’s worth their time.
Cause a Chain Reaction
The chain reaction would be the worst-case scenario resulting from deleting a bad review and while it is rare, it does happen. Deleting one bad review can end with a bunch of your customers and even non-customers turning against your business. This “rally for the people” tactic ends in a boycott of the offending business. Risking this situation is just not worth it to remove one bad review that will be balanced out by all the other positive reviews in time.
Tempting as it might be, keeping yourself from clicking that delete button may be the best thing for your business in the long run. Instead, you should respond to the bad review in a customer-friendly way and try to resolve any problems the customer had. Just remember that one bad review one won’t be the end of your company and your customers understand that an overall positive rating is more important than one bad review from one person.
Want to know the benefits of keeping bad reviews? Check out our blog, The Benefits of Bad Reviews!