How to Deal with Negative Reviews for Your Fire Protection Business

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series on customer reviews for fire protection businesses. Click here to read the previous article.

Customer reviews can be an asset for your fire protection business. Positive reviews help you build trust with current and potential customers, allowing you to expand your business. However, not every review you get online will be positive. And negative reviews can do significant damage to your business when left unaddressed. If you’ve got a strategy to build your online reputation through customer reviews, you know you can’t ignore the not-so-positive feedback your business receives. So how do you deal with negative reviews when they come?

The Impact of Negative Reviews

While online reviews offer many benefits–and your business should have a strategy to collect reviews across the different platforms–negative reviews can have a seriously negative impact. A negative review about poor service or products has the potential to damage your reputation and deter future customers. Individual reviews contribute to your business’s overall rating; to maintain at least a four-star rating, you need four five-star reviews for every one-star review. Those are some high stakes. Some experts have estimated that because happy customers are less likely to leave a review than unhappy customers, 40 positive customer experiences are required to overcome a single negative review and maintain a high average rating.

Even if you have plenty of positive reviews and a good rating, negative reviews still leave a bad impression of your business. Negative reviews are often more detailed and, unless you take time to publicly or privately address the matter, can lead prospective customers away from your fire protection business. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

What Causes Negative Reviews?

What are some of the most common reasons customers leave negative reviews for fire protection businesses? The first way to deal with negative reviews is to try to avoid them in the first place by providing an exceptional customer experience. Avoid common complaints like:

• Missed Appointments & Delays: Inefficient scheduling and dispatch systems can lead to missed appointments and service call delays, frustrating and inconveniencing customers. Unsurprisingly, this leads to negative reviews that call out unprofessionalism and unreliable services.
• Communication Issues: Inconsistent communication between technicians, office staff, and customers leads to misunderstandings and confusion. Communication breakdowns make your company look unorganized and leave your customers feeling frustrated.
• Errors & Oversights: Inefficient workflows make it challenging to manage deadlines, leading to missed appointments, extended service completion dates, or delays in report submissions. Errors, inefficient processes, or manual data entry can leave your customers feeling like your employees rushed through their work, overlooking important details that can result in property damage, compliance penalties, or even loss of life.

Mitigating the damage of negative reviews when they do occur starts with addressing them head-on.

Dealing with Negative Reviews

Mitigating the damage of negative reviews when they occur starts with addressing them head-on. Leverage every review–positive and negative–to build trust and strategically scale your business. Using customer feedback to optimize your workflow allows you to take your company to the next level and meet customer needs.

Start by making the unhappy customer feel heard and understood. Again, it’s possible to stop a negative review before it happens. When something doesn’t go to plan, and you’re unable to deliver the best customer experience possible, try to address the issue proactively. When customers complain to you directly before posting a review online, listen and try to solve the problem before it spirals.

Sometimes, proactively addressing a problem isn’t possible–whether the challenge wasn’t preventable or a customer goes straight to leave a negative review. Some reviews require a simple public response apologizing for the inconvenience or issue and asking for a private follow-up. For more serious complaints, follow up with the customer privately to attempt to resolve the issue. They may change their negative review to a positive one if things go well. Not only does that leave you with a happy customer–who will likely come back to your business when they need fire protection services in the future–but it builds trust with prospective customers who see your willingness to resolve problems as they arise.

Finally, the time may come when you can’t effectively deal with a negative review. And that’s okay. It won’t be the end of your business. What you can do is continue to request positive reviews from satisfied customers to continue to balance out your rating and demonstrate your commitment to a high level of service.

Inspect Point helps you deliver that high-quality service by streamlining your workflow, automating processes, and enhancing communication so nothing falls through the cracks.