But what happens when we get a negative review? It’s not the end of the world. In fact, if we handle it well enough, it’s an opportunity to develop relationships with customers and nurture loyalty.

In this video, I offer five steps on how to manage bad online reviews.

How do you manage your online reputation? What steps do you need to keep in mind to ensure you are handling negative reviews well? Here are five steps to take:

• Listen.

Stay on top of customer reviews. Spend a few minutes each week finding out what customers are saying about you. You will receive alerts if these reviews are left in your social media pages, such as Facebook. You may also set up Google Alerts to get notifications when customers talk about you online.

• Don’t take it personally.

Remember that they are complaining about their negative experience—they are not out to get you. They want to be heard; they want you to know that you failed them. You aim to understand why it happened and how you can fix the issue.

Bad reviews are opportunities for growth and development. Many businesses pay for expensive mystery shopping services to identify and understand service and operations lapses. Bad reviews, on the other hand, are free. Furthermore, when appropriately handled, bad reviews are opportunities to build relationships and nurture customer loyalty. So don’t take them personally.

• Respond immediately. Investigate thoroughly.

When we say respond immediately, we mean investigating the matter as soon as you discover this bad review. Approach your team immediately and get as much information as possible, beginning with validating the information in the review. Did the incident happen as described? What caused this product or service issue? Which details are missing in the review?

Once you figure out the details, craft your response. Apologise any lapses you need to take accountability for. Take responsibility and assure the customer that this issue will be addressed so that it doesn’t happen again. If needed, provide a remedy. You may offer a discount coupon or a small token if this lapse significantly impacts the customer experience.

Do NOT erase or remove the bad review, even if you have already resolved it. When you leave this conversation thread online, it leaves an impression that the business is genuine. There is no perfect business. Scrubbing bad reviews may harm your business more than good because it makes you look like you are hiding things from your customers. Being genuine in a public forum may attract prospective clients rather than turn them away because it tells them that you’re honest and take accountability.

• Take it offline before things get heated.

What do you do if things escalate? Or what if the harm was so serious that a simple apology would not cut it? You take things offline.

While we want genuine conversations with our customers, we don’t want to air dirty laundry because it is not productive. Allowing it to escalate only results in a public shouting match.

The ideal scenario we want is this. Once we’ve acknowledged the bad review, we contact the customer privately. We also resolve the issue privately.

• Take the necessary steps for customer recovery, especially when it’s your fault.

When you apologise, make sure you follow up with action. Work with your team to address the issue to ensure it doesn’t happen again to another customer.

This is what they call customer recovery in marketing. This means making amends with the customer for the poor experience and regaining their trust.

More importantly, it makes more sense to be proactive to ensure that bad reviews don’t happen often. Empower your team members so they know how to resolve customer issues as soon as they happen, so they don’t need to go online and speak poorly of you. Create a culture of open communication within your team so that customer issues are communicated immediately to everyone concerned.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, don’t fake your reviews. Glowing reviews raise customer expectations. It will only benefit brands when they are authentic. But when your customers don’t experience what these reviews say, it leads to disappointment. And guess what? Disappointment leads to poor reviews.

No business is perfect. We all make mistakes. The value is in how to recover from our mistakes, how we resolve the issue, and how we make the customer feel.