As an ecommerce site, how do you recover from a series of poor customer reviews? Naturally, positive reviews can make your site shine and encourage conversion, but negative ones can damage it, enforcing negative perceptions about the usefulness of the products you make or sell.

If a prospective customer reads glowing comments about your product or service and the overall user experience, then they are more likely to trust you as a supplier. In fact, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has been proven to be one of the single most helpful tools to increasing online sales and 84% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over any other kind of advertising.

Additionally, eConsultancy recently points out that consumer reviews are trusted nearly 12 times more than product descriptions from manufacturers, and positive sentiment can drive as much as an 18% uplift in sales.

How can you spin bad reviews into a positive for your ecommerce site?

While the focus should never be on growing bad reviews, it’s important to note that there can be some net positives arising from an initially bad situation; however these very much depend on the proportion of good to bad.

Negative reviews make the positive ones more believable, but there is a point at which they may ring alarm bells for consumers.

●     Presenting both good and bad reviews and ratings makes you seem more human

Achieving 100% customer satisfaction scores is frankly unrealistic as there will always be unexpected issues; however a 91% rate by contrast is a positive signifier that, vitally, appears natural. It’s this believability that can help establish credibility and trust with your site.

However, businesses should be wary of too many negative customer reviews, as recent research by Lightspeed in the UK found that between one and three bad online reviews is enough to deter a majority of shoppers (67%) away from completing a purchase of a product or service on your site.

Publishing only the good reviews makes you look a little robotic

●     Bad reviews can make your good reviews stand out

Whilst it’s important to be wary of impacting negatively through your bad reviews, it can help your overall customer service profile. A Zendesk study recently discovered that whilst 45% of customers tend to share negative customer service reviews via social media, 38% of customers will also share a positive interaction or review.

In fact, a bad review will make your good reviews stand out and be all the more telling and of interest to your customers, particularly when it is directly addressed by the business and responded to. The same online researchers from the 2011 study found that negative comments do not necessarily have a negative impact on sales, but help to give a fuller picture of a product.

●     They help you improve

Bad reviews can help you enhance your overall product and service offering and enhance the customer journey. A negative comment need not be a damning of the service - rather it should be a suggestion on what you need to improve on, a ‘sense check’ of what isn’t working and what problems need to be addressed.

●     They help you convert

The time that your prospective customers spend reading online reviews is, vitally, time that they are still residing on your site. This means you can take your time marketing to them, engaging, and displaying compelling CTAs, more so than if they just abandoned from the site straight away.

Listening to reviews will help you make running repairs to your site and service

●     Candid reviews can work better than aggregate scores

We’ve seen a spate of new ratings services lately, such as TrustPilot and the like, but research says they are not as good as written reviews. According to researchers from the University of Mainz, a single written review can have more influence than a bunch of cumulative ratings. Added to that, the study found that aggregated star ratings have much less influence on a website visitor than a single, candid written review.

So how to come back from a spate of negative reviews?

If you’ve recently found yourself the recipient of bad reviews, don’t panic. There are a few quick ways to dampen the flames of online negativity:

1. Respond quickly, ideally within the first day of receiving a complaint.
2. Be polite and do not respond emotionally. Accept responsibility for the fault and try to diffuse the situation. Remember that you are a representative of your brand.
3. If possible attempt to come up with a speedy resolution, such as offering information or answering product questions.
4. Give a satisfactory follow up response within 48 hours.

At the end of the day, poor customer reviews are not the most pleasant part of working in an always-online eCommerce world, but it is one that comes with the territory. Rather than acting like they don’t exist, confront them head on by viewing them as an opportunity to get customer service right the first time, help build up trust in your online brand and establish that your company is run effectively.

Good – and bad – customer service interactions affect brand loyalty, but being honest and forthright with the steps you take to correct a negative interaction, can go a long way to repairing any perceived damage.

Tom Weeks is UK sales director at Ve