You should know what your customers think about your products and services, so you can tell what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. By checking out review sites like Yelp, you can see what people are saying about your business. Keep reading and find out if you should respond to reviews on Yelp.

Answer Questions
Customer service needs to be a top priority if you want to succeed as a business, and you need feedback to make yours the best it can be. A good way to find out what people have to say about your business is to look up your company on Yelp. Review sites give you a chance to get open and honest feedback from your customers and clients after they’ve experienced your service. Since customer service has moved online over the years, it can be helpful to respond to reviews that attempt to reach out to your team with specific questions.

Show Customers You Care
By responding to your feedback, you show customers, fans, and potential clients that you care about the quality of the work you perform. It’s easy to ignore your reviews and continue to run things the way you think works, but the best way to improve is to listen to what your customers have to say. Be polite and respectful in your responses and maintain your professional voice.

Know What Not to Take to Heart
Not every Yelp review is worth responding to. You’re bound to come across people who leave unreasonable comments, whether they had one bad experience, or they just happened to be in a bad mood and had unreasonable expectations, and some of these comments might not be worth responding to.

At G4H Consulting, we can help you manage your online reputation. We handle web design, social media management, and search engine optimization. Give us a call at (585) 755-0366 or look at our website to see what you can expect from us.

Online reviews can make or break a business, and I’m not just talking about the ones left by customers. Although it’s a great idea for companies to respond to every online review they get (good or bad), a company can make a bad situation way, way worse by responding to a review in a disrespectful, defensive, or flat out insulting way. Here are some examples of some of the most disastrous ways that business owners have ever responded to bad online reviews.

Thanksgiving: A Day For Togetherness.
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When you spend 200 dollars on a meal, you expect it to be prepared to your specifications. If it isn’t to your liking, you certainly don’t expect a condescending and vulgar response from the restaurant owner when you complain. Granted, the customer was pretty rough on the restaurant, but there’s no excuse for this rant!

​The Radiator Doctor Doesn’t Stand For Internet Tough Guys!
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The Radiator Doctor may sound like an obscure 80’s hard rock band, but it’s actually an auto repair shop in California. Or at least, it used to be: it is now closed, and bad customer service and macho responses to customer complaints like this one likely had a hand in its demise:

​Thanks For Your Comment! (But Generic Answers and Responses Help Nobody)
Is there anything more infuriating than getting a canned, unhelpful response to your problem from a corporate communication channel? Unfortunately for frustrated travellers, airlines are some of the worst when it comes to this. Watch as American Airlines tweets the same absurdly confident canned response over and over: even in response to a complaint.

​Fining People For Leaving Bad Reviews? Oh Union Street Guest House, You So Crazy!
Dissuading people from leaving bad reviews is tempting, but threatening to fine them? The Union Street Guest House in New York deciding to stick some fine print in their check in documents that threatened to stick their guests with a 500 dollar fine if they left a negative review! Not surprisingly, there was backlash, and they currently have a 1.5 rating on Yelp because of it and their other dishonest practices.
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Say It To The Chef’s Face, You Big Sissy!
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Not every diner is going to like what you serve them. What a wonderful job being a chef would be if they did, right? When James Isherwood commented on one unsavory element of an otherwise enjoyable meal, the extremely thin-skinned chef went on a rampage:

​Incredibly, two other chefs later joined in the attack on James Isherwood, resulting in him eventually deleting his Twitter account. This leads me to ask: are all chefs this sensitive to criticism, or is this an isolated case?

Nestle: All The Social Media Smarts of a Jar of Palm Oil, With None of the Smoothness

Greenpeace activists had a beef with Nestle over their use of palm oil that was harvested from deforested areas. So many people were complaining on their Facebook page that they banned anyone that had an altered Nestle logo as their profile picture. However, Nestle decided to go one step further by insulting the commenters, as you can see below. Actually, a jar of palm oil might have done a better job than Nestle’s (likely former) social media manager, because doing nothing at all is better than doing this:
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Oh Yeah, and Don’t Track Down the Person Who Left the Review and Attack Them at Home!

You’d think this would be a given, but I guess it isn’t! The owner of a now-closed bookstore in San Francisco got so mad at this fairly benign review that she wrote him harassing emails, tracked the guy down, barged into his home and then physically assaulted him. She was cited for battery and placed in psychiatric holding, proving that sometimes that legal system gets it right.
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In the words of Bill & Ted: WHOA!

I AM WONDER WOMAN, BRING IT ON!
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Amy’s Baking Company is one of the few restaurants that Gordon Ramsey ever gave up on during an episode of Kitchen Nightmares. After reading some of the things the bistro has said when responding to customer complaints, it’s easy to see why! Caps lock may not be cruise control for cool, but it’s definitely cruise control for internet mockery: the insane rant backfired on them so bad, they later claimed their account was hacked. (It wasn’t.) Let’s follow the treacherous tracks of the “crazy train.”
It goes from sanctimonious:

I mean, parents of a HUMAN kid?! As we all know, Wonder Woman was molded from clay and brought to life by a goddess. That doesn’t sound human to me, Amy’s Baking Company! (And if the current kids they mention having aren’t human, what in the world are they?!
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But all good things have to come to an end, so after it was all over, they claimed the rant was all someone else’s fault. Shocking, no?

Thanks for the memories, Amy’s Baking Company! Unfortunately for you and all the other companies on this list, the internet is forever, so the next time your company faces a bad review, show professionalism and discretion when you respond. Even if the customer is out of line or even downright insulting, be the bigger person: because very often, the customer is always right in the eyes of the internet. Keep in mind that your business may actually end up benefitting from the bad review once people see how professional you were in the face of adversity!

Find out more about G4H Consulting’s ReviewLead, a program for local marketing and reputation management, and find out ways to avoid the same mistakes!

​Realistically, everyone will get a less than pleasant review every now and then. Unfortunately, there’s just no way around it. When you do get a negative review, make it a learning experience. Rather than getting fired up and attacking the reviewer, take the opportunity to think about what you can change to make your business more accommodating or efficient. Talk to your customers without attacking them, and then decide what changes you should implement. Here’s a look at some of the right and wrong ways to handle negative reviews.

RIGHT: Follow Up with Customers

You’ve got a lot on your plate when you run your own business, but you should always be thinking about customer service and response. You need to check up on your reviews, so you know what people are saying about your company. If you come across a negative review for your products or services, you can find out why this happened by reaching out to the person who left it. Reaching out like this will help you find out how you can improve your business as well as get to the bottom of what the problem was in the first place.

WRONG: Publicly Attack Reviewers

Although it can help to respond to negative reviews on a public forum, never do so in an antagonistic way. Instead, try to find out what the nature of the problem is and offer a solution that changes the reviewer’s mind.

RIGHT: Make Changes to Your Company

The point of reading your own reviews is to find out what your company is doing right and what you could be doing better. When you notice a few different reviews that give you the same kind of advice, do your best to implement the changes so you can satisfy your customers.


If you get a negative review or two, take some time to reorganize and decide how to come back stronger than ever. The team at G4H Consulting can help you with web design, email marketing, and Facebook advertising, and you can look through our website or call us at (585) 755-0366 for more information.