If your face is still hot from a bad experience at a local business, you may forget to ask the most important question. Before you take to your phone or keyboard to delete a negative review, ask,
“I’m going to invest more of my precious time in this business that’s failing to serve me well; What do I want to spend this time on?”
Do you want:
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The response from business owners?
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apologize?
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Your money back / your product exchanged / reworked / replacement experience?
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A guarantee that something has been fixed so that others don’t have the same problem?
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A good reason to give a business a second chance?
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To prevent important local businesses from failing by reporting what is wrong?
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Apart? If so, can you name it?
Even if there is a scenario that doesn’t make sense, then the best option is to just walk away and try to forget everything for peace of mind, decide to leave a review signal if you still invest in the scenario you experienced.
Take an extra minute to check your motives:
1. Leave a review for revenge
This is the worst reason to leave a review and the most unproductive use of your time. While you may feel relief from the venting process by destroying a nearby business in hopes of damaging your reputation in the community, it will likely not lead to resolution of the problem you are experiencing.
The desire to make a dramatic declaration of anger through a review may arise from the feeling that you have been treated poorly. I’ve seen the word “ripoff” thrown around carefully in reviews, and think it’s a useful practice to gauge whether it’s accurate in certain scenarios:
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Have you really been ripped off by a company with unethical business practices, such as intentionally overcharging, intentionally not providing services as agreed/advertised, intentionally using tactics like bait-and-switch or price gouging? An example of a ripoff would be a business chain that on purpose list one price on the shelves while secretly charging customers a higher price at the register.
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Alternatively, what you are experiencing may be the result of a single mistake, an unusual failure in the business, a lack of staff training, a misunderstanding, or a business that is not working well and needs to be improved. don’t want to fail? An example of a non-ripoff is that your pizza is cold because the delivery person’s vehicle is stuck in traffic; Your bad experience is not the result of someone trying to trick you. Most businesses do not operate on a ripoff basis.
If you think something illegal has happened in your business, taking revenge through a review is the weakest option. However, you may want to contact local lawyers and journalists or consumer protection groups to explain your experience. This can then lead to local or national reports that blow the whistle on the alleged practice. If enough money is involved, it may lead to a legal settlement.
2. Leave a review as a PSA
A better motive than revenge is to leave a negative review because you want to warn the local community that there is something unpleasant about the neighborhood business. In fact, Moz’s own review survey found that telling others about their experiences (both good and bad) is the #1 reason consumers write reviews. 73% of respondents are motivated by this impulse, which means that this is the main reason for online reviews.
It is commendable that, after being treated poorly, you want to make a public service announcement that protects your neighbors from having the same negative experience. But, in the spirit of fairness, ask yourself,
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Should I use blistering language to let my neighbors know that I ordered a pizza, it came cold? Did I achieve my goal of giving advice to others in language like, “This idiot can’t deliver a hot pizza”? Or can the PSA use lighter words like, “One time I ordered, I was disappointed because the pizza arrived cold and no one cared, and I want to know why this happened before I consider giving your business a second chance”?
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Would my community be better served by warning directly through this review or using my review to get the owner’s attention, which I didn’t receive during service?
It’s sad that there are business owners who don’t care or don’t care that they won’t act on the general response no matter how hard you try. Especially in the case of large brands, leadership is often removed from customers where no effort is made to change policies and practices at the local level. In this common scenario, PSAs can be your best bet to contribute your unfortunate life experiences to the public knowledge pool so that others can read them and decide whether or not to try the business. If this is what you choose, try to be detail-oriented as possible about what is wrong and to show wisdom, instead of anger, in the hope that you can help your neighbor make an informed choice.
But in other cases, where the business owner is accessible and empowering to create positive change, PSA may be only a second best option; instead, a review that takes your complaint straight to the top may be your best hope for getting the results you want.
3. Leaving a review is an opening to dialogue with the business owner
When our survey found that almost ¾ of review writers leave a review to share their experience with the public, I think this is a real problem that only 38% write to inform the business that it is necessary to improve, and only 21% write to receive a reply.
Very often, this is a timeline of what happens during an unsatisfactory local business transaction:
