How to respond to a bad review, with real examples

The single most useful thing to understand about replying to a bad review is that the reviewer is not the audience. They have said their piece and they are unlikely to change it.

The audience is everyone who reads that review over the next two years while deciding whether to call you. Your reply is the only part of the exchange you control, and it is being read by people who have not yet made up their minds.

The three sentence shape

Almost every good reply has the same structure, and it is short. Replies are the cheapest piece of off-page work available to a local business, because the audience is already reading.

1. 01Acknowledge the specific thing, using their words. Not a general apology, the actual complaint.
2. 02State the fact or the change, briefly and without arguing.
3. 03Offer one route to sort it out, off the platform.

That is it. Three sentences, sometimes four. The length of a reply is inversely related to how well it reads: a long one looks like a business that has been stung.

Four situations

1. They are right

Booked for Tuesday morning, nobody turned up, nobody called. Had to take another day off work.

· One star

You are right and I am sorry. We had a job overrun
and we should have called you rather than leaving
you waiting. We have changed how we handle overruns
so the next customer gets a call by 9am.
If you would still like the work done, ring me
directly on 07 xxxx xxxx and I will come myself.

Dan, owner

No defence, no explanation dressed as an apology, and one concrete change. The reader learns that when this business gets something wrong, it says so. That is worth more than the star.

2. They are wrong, and you can prove it

Charged me for parts they never fitted. Complete rip off.

· One star

Thanks for raising this. Our record shows the two
parts on your invoice were fitted on 14 March and
the old ones were left with you at your request.
I am happy to go through the invoice line by line
and to have the work inspected at our cost if you
would like a second opinion.
Please call the office and ask for me.

Dan, owner

Facts, stated flatly, with an offer that only a business in the right would make. Notice what is absent: no accusation, no adjective, no suggestion the customer is lying. The reader can work that out for themselves, and they will trust their own conclusion more than yours.

3. It is not your customer

Rude staff, dirty premises, never again.

· One star, no name you recognise, no matching job

We take this seriously but we cannot find a job or
a booking matching your name or details. If we have
got something wrong we would genuinely like to fix
it, so please call the office with the date and we
will look into it.
If this has reached us by mistake, no hard feelings.

Dan, owner

Never open by declaring it fake. You might be wrong, and a business that publicly calls a customer a liar has lost the reader either way. State what you checked, invite the detail, leave the door open. Report it to Google separately and quietly, on the grounds that actually work rather than on unfairness.

4. It is about price

$180 to change a tap washer. Daylight robbery.

· Two stars

Fair enough, that is a lot for a washer if that is
all it was. The call included the callout, the parts
and the twenty minute inspection of the second leak
you asked about. All of that is on the invoice.
Our callout fee is on our website so nobody gets a
surprise. If you think the invoice is wrong, call
me and we will go through it.

Dan, owner

Price complaints are the easiest to answer well and the most commonly answered badly. Do not apologise for your prices. Explain what was included, point at where the pricing is published, and move on.

When to say nothing

Almost never, but there are two cases. If the matter is subject to a legal or regulatory process, take advice before writing anything public. And if you are angry, wait until tomorrow. Nothing is improved by a same-hour reply, and a lot has been ruined by one. Volume is the better defence in any case: a single one star among ninety is a rounding error, which is the argument in how many reviews you actually need.

Reply to the good ones too

A profile where only the one star reviews have replies tells its own story: this business responds to threats. Replying to everything, briefly, makes the difficult replies read as normal rather than as damage control. Response rate is also one of the signals the local algorithm reads, so the habit pays twice.

Getting more reviews in the first place, so that a bad one carries less weight, is covered in how to ask for a review. And if you have been screening customers so that only the happy ones are asked, stop: it breaches Google's policies, and a wall of unbroken five stars is read as bought by exactly the customers you were trying to impress. A visible bad review with a calm reply underneath it does more work than its absence would.