What to do when a client leaves you a bad review

It's nine at night, you're on the couch, and there it is. One star. From a job you remember perfectly, described in a way you don't recognize at all.

Your chest goes tight and you start writing the reply in your head. You've got receipts. You've got the text thread. You could lay the whole thing out in four sentences and anybody reading it would see it your way.

Do not send that.

I want to be straight with you about something before we go further: Exalted can't do a thing about a bad Google review. Nobody's software can. What follows is what works, and most of it is knowing where to put your energy.

The reply is not for the reviewer

This is the part that takes a minute to sink in.

You are not writing to the person who left the review. That relationship is already where it is, and a public post is not where it gets repaired.

You're writing for the next forty people who read it. Somebody two weeks from now, deciding between you and one other outfit, is going to scroll down, see the one star, and then read your response. What they're weighing in that moment is what you're like to deal with when something goes wrong, and nobody on earth cares who was right about the invoice.

Answer the question they're asking.

Wait a day

Around here we tend to want to square things up right away. Fight that.

The reply you write twenty minutes after reading it is the one with the receipts in it. The one you write the next morning, after you've slept and had your coffee and gone out on a job, is shorter and better and doesn't include the phrase "as I clearly explained."

Twenty-four hours. Nobody's forming an opinion of your business based on your response time to a review.

What to write

Short and plain, with no defense in it.

Hi Dave. I'm sorry the job didn't land right. That's not the standard we hold ourselves to and I'd like to make it right if you'll let me. I'm at 815-555-0142 whenever suits.

Ty

Three moves in there and that's all you need.

Acknowledge it happened. Not "I'm sorry you feel that way," which everyone can read as a dodge. Something that admits the experience was real.

Don't relitigate. No timeline. No "the delay was because of the supplier." Even when it's completely true, a paragraph of explanation reads as defensive to a stranger, and the stranger is your audience.

Move it off the platform. A phone number does two things at once. It gives the reviewer a genuine way to resolve it, and it shows every future reader that you were willing to pick up the phone about it.

Then stop. One reply. If they come back angrier, let it sit. A reviewer posting three more times under your one calm response is a picture that speaks for itself, and it isn't speaking about you.

When it's flatly false

Sometimes the review comes from a competitor, or somebody who's got you mixed up with another business, or a person you've never met.

Flag it with the platform. Google will remove reviews that break their policies, and being confused with a different company is a solid case.

Then plan on it not working. Flagged reviews come down sometimes and stay up plenty. If it stays, respond the same calm way, with one correction of fact and nothing more: "I don't have a record of this job. If we did work for you and I've got the name wrong, please call me." That reads honest. "THIS REVIEW IS FAKE" reads like a man losing an argument, even when he's the one telling the truth.

The only thing that fixes it

Volume. There isn't a second thing.

One bad review sitting among five is a flashing light. The same review among sixty is a bad Tuesday in a business that's been running a long time, and everybody reading understands that instantly, because everybody has had a bad Tuesday.

Nothing else moves the needle like this. Not the perfect reply, not flagging, not a burst of five-star reviews from your cousins, which is obvious to spot and worse than doing nothing at all.

So the fix for a bad review mostly happens before you get one. A business that's been steadily asking for a year has a cushion. A business that never asked has a review page that is one angry person and nothing else.

The part I can help with

There's a split here worth understanding.

The Google review is out of your hands. Live with it, respond well, bury it under real volume over time.

But your own website is not out of your hands, and it's where a good chunk of those forty people end up next. Somebody who reads a one star on Google and clicks through to a site with a dozen specific, believable clients describing exactly what you did for them has just had the review put in context by twelve other people.

None of that hides anything. It makes sure the one loud voice isn't the only voice.

One more thing

Go back and read it again in a week, once it doesn't sting.

Sometimes there's something in there. Not the tone, not the star, but a detail: you were three days late, or nobody called them back on the Thursday. Buried in the worst thing anybody wrote about you this year is occasionally one true sentence about your business.

Fix that one thing and the review turns out to have been worth something. I won't pretend that's a nice way of looking at it, but it is the only part of the whole business you control.