How to deal with customer complaints?

Start by understanding who your reviewers are and why they're writing their reviews. This will give you clarity, showing you how to respond. If they're unhappy, make things right. If they're misguided, share the facts. If they're abusive, monitor but do not engage with their complaints.

Common ways to handle customer complaints?

Common approaches include: Apologizing and owning mistakes, take the conversation offline, look for a win/win solution to the customer's problem. While these are common approaches to customer complaints, they're not always the best.

What are the 5 steps to handling a customer complaint?

Here are several approaches you can take: Ask for more information. Gather intel from customers. Apologize and look for opportunities to make things right. Offer incentives to compensate customers for the loss of their time and money. Ask customers for feedback or updates to their review.

What is the best way to respond to a customer complaint?

Here are some actionable steps you can take to respond to your customer complaints. (1.) Listen to your reviewer, (2.) be transparent, (3.) cite your sources, (4.) be timely, (5.) watch your tone, (6.) offer next steps, (7.) escalate to management, (8.) apply the 80/20 rule.

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Google Review Attributes Expand To New Categories

May 20, 2020

Update 6/17/20: GatherUp Launches Google Review Attributes Monitoring

Recently we started seeing Google “review attributes” (What do you like about this place?) being asked for and displayed in new categories including lawyers, accountants, financial planners, architects, salons, car repair and dry cleaning. Review attributes are now showing more broadly on industries typically classified as Other Services and Professional/Technical Services in the NAICS coding system. (h/t to KHarris08 at the LocalSearchForum who spotted the expansion).

Positive & Negative Review Attributes

Late last fall we started seeing Google asking for additional positive and negative attributes about a business when leaving a review in most service area businesses (plumbing, hvac etc).

These new attributes show at the top of the review with the wording “Positive” or “Critical” and then all that were selected by the user. These are currently visible in organic search via the business profile but are not visible yet for the same listing within Maps.

Here is an example of a Google review where the review selected four positive attributes when writing their review.

positive Google review attributes — Example of a Google review with positive attributes.

negative google review with negative attributes — Example of a Google review with critical attributes

How Google Asks The Reviewer For Attributes

The ability to be asked for and add these attributes is available in Google search and Google Maps on the desktop but is only an option (on iOS) from search and not from iOS Maps.

When leaving these new attributes, you are presented with negative attributes based on the star rating you have selected. Let’s take a look at how the rating affects what you are asked and presented with for attributes.

If you select 1 or 2 stars then “critical” attributes are presented as you are asked “What do you not like about this business?”

If you select a 3-star rating for your review, then no attributes are presented for selection.

If you select 4 or 5-stars for your review, you are then asked “What do you like about this business” and can select the positive attributes.

When a Google review is left for in-home service providers, users are presented the same attributes as salons and lawyers for quality, value, professionalism, and responsiveness. But an additional attribute is added for timeliness.

Why Are Google Review Attributes Important?

It allows those users that just want to leave a rating, a quick way to criticize or compliment one or more areas of your business. Instead of just a “rating only” review of 2-stars of 5-stars and no explanation, comment or context, reviews can now add that in a couple of clicks. It’s not hard to see that this bolsters each Google review without any typing by the consumer.

Once blank or “rating-only” reviews now have some context and content to them with attributes.

It can provide users with more nuanced reviews that will allow them to distinguish between one 4.2 rated provider and the next.

And perhaps more importantly this new data provides Google with significantly more structured AND consistent data about the quality of your business, perhaps allowing them to return the best of class practitioners not just the most prominent one.

We are exploring how we might show these results within GatherUp and our review monitoring services. As of now, it does not appear that even Google is surfacing the data in their API.

Mike Blumenthal

Mike Blumenthal is a co-founder of GatherUp and helps oversee our research, industry insight and agency offering. Mike has long been regarded as the foremost expert on local search and Google Maps, earning the nickname “Professor Maps”. Mike also co-founded Local University, which provides small business and agency training in sustainable local search marketing. His motto: All Local All the Time. He writes at his blog and does a twice a week LocalU podcast about Local marketing.

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