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.

← Blog Home

FTC & Reviews: March 2022 Webinar Recap

March 9, 2022

On March 7th, Mike Blumenthal, co-founder of GatherUp and Near Media, joined to discuss the changing review landscape. He discussed the latest Federal Trade Commission guidance and how best to work within this new review environment. Steve Hartman showed GatherUp product updates made following this updated guidance. Watch the webinar below.

Watch the March 2022 Webinar

March 2022 Webinar Agenda

Mike set the stage talking about the shifting review landscape (2:00) and the new guidance for businesses (3:00).

But what prompted this updated guidance? Blumenthal went into the ruling against online retailer Fashion Nova and the fallout from that decision (5:15) . Business are responsible to know the rules, and how their review management platform, if they’re using one, is operating (6:50).

Next, Mike went into details on how this new guidance should be handled by platforms, such as GatherUp, and agencies. (7:40) Blumenthal also went into the risks of violating this FTC guidance. (13:25)

The final topic of Mike’s presentation was living with these new changes (15:50). A large part of this discussion centered on the negative impact of review gating and review suppression. Businesses and agencies should be moderating their reviews, but also creating a terms of service or online review policy (20:10).

At the 25:00 mark, Steve Hartman, Product Marketing Manager, let attendees know about product changes GatherUp had made to address the FTC guidelines. The goal is to make sure the GatherUp platform is following best practices and helping our customers stay in compliance.

Finally, (31:30) Mike, Steve and Chris Walker answered a few questions from the audience.

Download the slides from this presentation here. GatherUp has also created a helpful user guide for moderating reviews and creating an online review policy.

The date for the next webinar has not yet been set, but look for an invite in the next few weeks.

Steve Hartman

JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER

Sign-up to receive our monthly email newsletter packed with new features, tips, news and webinar invites.

BLOG CATEGORIES

Blog Categories

We'll help you build a better business

Our goal is to help you connect with your customers to gain valuable insight on what’s important to them. While you happy customers will help your marketing, your unhappy customers will point out where you can improve and our system will help you communicate with them to keep them with you.