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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Will Google’s New Privacy Policies Affect Reviews?

June 26, 2020

Google recently announced that they would now delete private web and location history data from their servers after 18 months unless advised otherwise. They also noted that these new default retention periods do not apply to Google products such as Gmail, Drive and Photos, because “such services are designed to store personal content for as long as users need access to it.”

But on Twitter the concern arose whether this auto-deletion process applied to reviews and whether it might lead to older reviews being deleted.

Will Google's new auto deletion of private information affect reviews?

Reviews Are Public

In fact just the opposite has occurred. Google has not only excluded reviews from this policy but they have rolled out a new highly visible, automatic notification that shows up when you first start to write a review that indicates that reviews are in fact pubic.

The notification is so visible that it blocks the users ability to see or leave the star rating for the review until they make an additional click.

Reviews Are Very Public

They go on to say in their help documentation that “if you do not want to share your experience … please do not publish it using this service”. Your reviews, along with your profile name and photo, will appear not just on Google but “may also appear within third-party sites that use Google embeddable widgets or the Google Maps Platform API”.

There is no expectation of privacy when you leave a review at Google and a review will not come down unless the original author explicitly removes it or Google determines that it is spam.

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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