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 Drops 55%. What is Going on?

November 7, 2019

Update 11/23/19: It might be too early to “declare victory” but several Google Product Experts have noted that the specific Q&A that they track have returned to “normal”, ie the number of Q&A they had when all of this started on October 10th. Barbara Oliver Jewelry, whose count has varied wildly since that time is now showing 11 once again. We will know more when we look at a large number of locations.

Update 11/18/19: While the volatility in Q&A continues with the number showing changing daily, least week at a regional Google Product Expert meetup, Google confirmed that it is a “technical issue” and that they are aware of the problem.

Starting on October 10th, we noticed a steep drop in the number of questions and answers that were showing in Google Business Profiles. My inbox literally blew up with notifications of Q&A’s being removed.

A few days later, the question was raised by Ben Fisher in the Local Search Forum and it was confirmed that the issue was Google-wide.

Google Q&A counts across all sites monitored by GatherUp from October 1, 2019, to November 6, 2019

Google Questions didn’t just disappear. They came and went, some days dropping by 90%. Other days saw Questions bouncing up and then completely returning only to be lost again. Barbara Oliver Jewelry’s original count of 11 dropped to 4, then 1, bounced back up to 7, and then back down to 4. Some days the front page count matched reality and on others it did not. Today, last I looked, they were back up to 10.

If a Question had an Answer, it also disappeared. Although they appear to not be “lost” they remain MIA.

We took a look at the number of Google Questions across the sites we monitor to see what was happening and exactly how many Questions had disappeared, or not. As of November 6th, 2019, we saw 55% fewer Google Questions than we had seen in early October.

The total number of Google Questions across sites monitored by GatherUp has declined 55% since October 1st, 2019

Ben Fisher of SteadyDemand asked Google (via the private Product Expert forum) exactly what was happening. He noted that even if a question had disappeared from view if a user started typing a question that could be answered by that lost question, it would show as an answer.

Google finally indicated that they were investigating and would let us know.

While we all wonder what is going on with Google Q&A and what is causing the volatility, we just don’t really know yet. All we can do for now is sit tight and wait for Google to make up our minds.

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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