Does your MSP have a negative online review? It might just be the perfect opportunity to interact with your customers, build trust, and show you value them.
A flurry of questions can go through your mind when you first read a negative online review about your Managed Service Provider. How do you respond? How will the review affect my business? Where did I go wrong?
Fortunately, a negative review doesn’t necessarily spell doom. In fact, negative reviews can be good for businesses. For starters, consumers generally suspect businesses that have perfect ratings and no negative comments – it could be a sign of fake reviews. Also, negative reviews are an opportunity to increase customer engagement, build trust, and boost your online reputation.
The key is to know what to do in the face of a negative review. In this article, we’ll walk you through five actionable steps you can take if your MSP has a negative review.
1. Analyze the review
You might be tempted to respond as soon as you see a bad review. However, such knee-jerk reactions are often not well-thought-out and may even worsen the situation.
First of all, read the entire review to understand the client's concerns. Make a list of the key things the client complained about and reach out to the relevant departments. You might have to conduct a thorough investigation to understand what went wrong.
Analyzing the review will also help you know if it’s a fake one. If that’s the case, report to the review platform.
2. Post a public response
Once you’ve accessed the review and gathered enough information, you should post a public response.
As a rule of thumb, respond to reviews within a few days, but don’t let your response go beyond a week. If your investigation to understand the complaint will take longer than a week, you can post a quick public response while doing your research.
Here’s an example:
“Hello John, thank you for your review. We apologize for the poor service you received. We’re looking into the matter, and we’ll resolve it promptly. Kindly reach out to us at email@ourcompany.com.”
Below are a few pointers to note when posting a public response:
- Use a polite and friendly tone
- Thank the customer for the review
- Take responsibility and be understanding
- Let the customer know what you’re doing or have done about their complaint
- Offer the customer a way to contact you
3. Continue the conversation in private and take action to resolve the complaint
The next step is to take the conversation offline. Send an email or call the person to understand the challenge they had with your product or service.
Again, start by showing gratitude for the review, apologize for the poor service and explain what you’ve done about it. That way, you give the aggrieved customer confidence to try your service once more.
If the customer is satisfied with your efforts, politely ask them to update the review by explaining how you’ve helped since the negative review.
4. Offer a token of gratitude
If the customer’s experience with your product or service led to the loss of valuable time or resources, it might be a good idea to offer compensation. Now, this does not necessarily mean giving the customer money. Rather, you can offer discounts or a free service.
For example, if you’re an MSP and one of your customers experiences technical issues that significantly affected their business due to a faulty process or a breakdown in customer service, you can offer them free project hours or another value added service.
However, it’s worth noting that you shouldn’t offer discounts and freebies to anyone who makes a complaint. Instead, examine each review on a case-by-case basis to determine if some form of compensation is the right thing to do.
5. Take steps to ensure you don’t get similar negative reviews
Negative customer reviews can help because they provide insights into where your MSP is failing. By following up on such reviews, you can discover if the issue is a one-off or it’s a company-wide problem.
A negative customer experience will result from 1 of 3 reasons:
- Misaligned expectations
For example, if your tech resolved a ticket within 2 hours with an SLA of 4 hours and they expected the issue to be resolved in 15 minutes there is misalignment.
Solution: The mother of frustration is unmet expectations. Talk to the customer and explain resolution times and follow up with company communication. - A broken process
For example, if you notice tickets and negative reviews coming from users when they receive new computers with an incorrect email configuration, there is probably an issue with the process.
Solution: Update the process and thank the customer(s) for pointing out the issue. - Poor experience with a team member
For example, you may notice a specific technician only using email and never following up with the customer by phone to resolve issues quickly.
Solution: Coach the technician to pick up the phone if he had to respond more than 2 times on a ticket through email or your ticket portal.
At Crewhu we like to say good feedback is great, bad feedback is great, but no feedback is bad. By proactively taking action on negative feedback your customers will feel heard and will likely become raving fans.
Crewhu can help
Crewhu is a customer satisfaction platform built specifically for MSPs. We help limit the number of negative online reviews and increase positive online reviews by giving your customers an outlet to easily provide you feedback.
What’s more, Crewhu can automatically publish positive reviews to your webpage (improving SEO) and provide workflows to make it easier for your clients to leave positive online reviews to help boost your online reputation.
"Crewhu is an amazing platform for collecting and acting on customer feedback and rewarding the great work done by our team. It has helped us get results and improve ROI and customer retention." - Will Nobles, CEO of Vector Choice
Book a discovery call to learn about our tailor-made solutions for your MSP, or download our NPS guide for more information.
