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 Q & A is Starting to Return

April 24, 2020

Update 5/6

Google Q & A has disappeared again. Status unknown at this time.

Update 4/30

We track Google Q & A across thousands of businesses. As of today, we have seen roughly 50% of the original volume having returned. And they are visible in primarily in the US in shopping and restaurants. We anticipate that the balance of the furloughed Q & A will return to other categories and countries after reviews have done so.

Google Q & A System Wide Count Over the Past 60 Days

Update 4/28: Like reviews, Q & A is not available for all business categories and is only currently seen on restaurants and shopping categories.

As you know, on March 20 or so Google, as part of their COVID-19 response, stopped showing any Questions & Answers (Q&A) in the business profile and stopped allowing new questions to be asked.

We monitor 10’s of thousands of locations for Google Q&A questions and responses. From that day until this Wednesday (April 22) our scrappers saw exactly ZERO questions.

Yesterday we saw three appear and today, many, many more. It appears that Google is starting the process of turning on the spigot for restaurants and shopping as we started seeing them for Dominoe’s and some big box retailers.

New Q&A Appearing And Old Ones Appearing

It appears that old Q & A are returning AND new ones are being accepted. They show in the Business Profile as well.

Somehow it is comforting to once again see the Google Q&A of yore with the Local Guide providing their “yes, no, maybe so” types of responses. And it appears that the Local Guides are raring to go, as this very topical question about whether they have alcohol was answered 12 times.

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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