Reviews, love them or loathe them, they are something modern businesses have to deal and content with. The power is in the hand of the consumer, and if they have a bad experience with you, a proportion of people will feel the need to publicly tell the world.
As a review site, we know only too well there are two sides to every story, and try to be as impartial as we can and help both parties. But you will never please everyone and sooner or later you will get a negative review or bad feedback.
Here's how not to deal with it!
A French restaurant received a negative review from a customer who complained about the bad service they received. The review was done by means of a blog post titled "The place to avoid in Cap-Ferret: Il Giardino".
Unfortunately this blog post was well indexed in Google, and the restaurant was understandably upset about it. So they decided to take the blogger to court and surprisingly they won. The blogger was instructed to change the name of the review, but instead they simply deleted it.
The blogger was also fined $2,040 and ordered to pay $1,360 in costs.
A worrying precedent, a very harsh judgement and has got a lot of people hot under the collar.
But the result of the punishment of the blogger has resulted in a barrage of negative publicity against the restaurant, a sea of negative online reviews and speculation if the restaurant will now survive the storm.
Here's a taster from their Google reviews:
So an interesting conundrum, the court settled on the restaurants favour, but their decision to fight the review instead of just responding or ignoring it has potentially destroyed the business, and done far more harm than if they had done nothing.
The story came from Search Engine Land, and they said in summary "The only “crime” here, then, was ranking too high in search results." An interesting and worrying conclusion.
Anyone else got any views or experience on dealing with negative reviews or criticism?
