Everyone’s a critic is a book that I read recently by Bill Tancer.  I read it, because to some extent all businesses face criticism at some stage or other and I wanted to know how to deal with it.  From that point of view, the book is extremely useful, indicating that no matter how good your business is, you will get some bad reviews, and that bad reviews don’t actually affect businesses as much as one may think.  That is not to say if a business only gets bad reviews that it won’t be affected, but it just means that depending on what the bad reviews are, and the response thereto, most members of the public are not really affected by negative reviews. This stance is backed up by empirical data that they supply as well as interviews with many business owners.  

The book says that the key to dealing with a negative review is to start with a thank you, and to then make your reply unique, sincere and directly address the complainant.  In that, in comparison to many of the complaints you see on Hello Peter where companies have what appears to be a whole lot of automatic replies that they cut and paste.  The author says you should also explain what went wrong with the matter and reiterate your vision for your own business, how it should run and how, if the client’s experience differed from it, and lastly offer to connect directly with the person who is complaining.  He says the one thing you should never do is offer compensation because it will lead to other people trying to extract similar benefits based on fraudulent allegations in the future. What I also found interesting is that most business owners have a sensitivity, like I do, to these complaints and typically get very worked up about them. The book takes the view that bad reviews happen and they say that reading negative reviews can have a positive effect on a business, especially when those reviews will have some validity to them.  Criticism on the other hand, especially if it has no basis or is vindictive, is very difficult to digest.  Tancer points out that a bad review is not necessarily about the product – there are award-winning restaurants that have bad reviews based on people not being able to get a booking with them - and on a similar note, most of the complaints I have dealt with in the past are from people with cases that are not economically viable, who are very upset that we will not take on their case.  That is altogether a different complaint than somebody saying they felt that a case was messed up and they never received as much compensation that they anticipated.  The fact of the matter is that there are many smaller claims which we do not take on and for good reason and one cannot get too worked up about listening to complaints from people who you cannot take on as a client.