Online reviews are essential to today’s customer experience, with more and more people checking them before eating at a restaurant, downloading an app or buying shoes from an e-commerce retailer.
Reviews influence online shopping decisions more than any other factor, with more than half of consumers stating that reviews are their top consideration, according to a 2024 Reputation survey.
Readers also tend to trust negative reviews more than positive ones. Research published in the Journal of Interactive Marketing indicates that other consumers perceive negative reviewers as more open and honest.
It goes without saying then that negative online reviews can harm a brand’s reputation and its bottom line.
“Negative reviews can be very damaging for businesses,” Vicki Morwitz, a professor of business and marketing professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, told CX Dive.
A study in the Journal of Marketing Research backs that up. When a consumer looked at reviews, “a single negative review on the first page reduced the likelihood of purchase by 42%,” the researchers wrote.
However, encouraging customers to leave constructive feedback and responding to it effectively can help businesses mitigate the damage and, ultimately, improve customer satisfaction in the long term, experts say.
The cathartic value of negative reviews
The impact of negative reviews on the sales would suggest that businesses should avoid them at all cost. But not all negative reviews are created equal.
Reviews that include rational and emotional elements — called integrated reviews — enable customers to feel better about their experiences compared with those that include rational or emotional expression alone, according to a new Columbia Business School study co-authored by Morowitz.
“The researchers found that writing an integrated negative review can provide a therapeutic effect after a negative experience with a business,” according to a news release.
In fact, experiment participants who wrote integrated reviews experienced a short-term increase in blood pressure, demonstrating a cathartic emotional response. Participants who wrote reviews that only included rational or emotional expression, meanwhile, did not.
“For businesses, this means that, while negative reviews can hurt a business’s brand, nuanced reviews may actually help customers come to terms with their individual experience, mitigate more significant consequences from one negative experience, and, ultimately, allow them to return to the business in the future,” the news release said.
In addition, consumers who wrote integrated reviews were more likely to recommend the business compared with those who did not.
And it’s not just the act of writing integrated reviews. The study also found that consumers who read integrated reviews responded as positively or more positively than those who read rational or emotional reviews.
“In order to increase customer retention, businesses should encourage customers to write reviews that draw on both the emotional and factual aspects of their experiences,” the news release said.
Asking open-ended questions for better feedback
Amazon, Yelp and other platforms provide guidance and structured questions for reviewers to encourage constructive feedback.
However, open-ended review questions are crucial to understanding a customer’s experience because they allow them to “tell you in their own words what made them give you that review,” said Maureen Burns, partner at consultancy Bain & Company.
“They’re going to tell you stuff they would never take the time to put in a survey,” Burns said.
Businesses should ask questions about specific aspects of the experience but steer clear of emotionally driven language to avoid “leading the witness too much,” Burns said.
Instead of just asking whether a customer was happy with the speed of service with a yes or no option, businesses can provide a blank text box that allows customers to provide more insight to how they felt about the speed of service.
And while interpreting responses to open-ended questions used to be difficult and time-consuming because it was challenging to analyze text, “we’re in the golden age of being able to process verbatim rapidly,” Burns said. “Every company should be asking for more direct, verbatim feedback.”
However, businesses should avoid asking customers to complete too many surveys or answer too many review questions, as this can make it harder for them to participate, potentially worsening response rates and the value of reviews, experts say.
Responding to negative reviews
About 9 in 10 online shoppers always or regularly read reviews, and three-quarters of shoppers intentionally seek out websites with ratings and reviews, according to a 2023 survey by Power Reviews.
Consequently, businesses should respond quickly to negative reviews, especially if they are public, to minimize their potential impact, experts advise.
Allowing a negative review to fester can exacerbate the situation.
“Do not ignore it. If you simply ignore negativity, it boils higher,” said Michael Podolsky, CEO of PissedConsumer.com, a third-party review website. “It is not what the consumer has written in that negative review that is important. It is the fact that the company doesn’t care.”
However, before responding, businesses should determine which remedies they are willing to offer, ensuring they can effectively address customers' complaints.
Morowitz also suggested that they contact the reviewer directly and try moving “the communication to a private channel to resolve that particular issue.”
Not only does this provide a learning opportunity for the organization, it also avoids engaging in potentially damaging public disputes and provides an opportunity to “save the customer,” Burns said.
Companies should also consider asking customers to update their reviews after their complaints are addressed to “describe the follow-up” and show other consumers that the business takes customer experience seriously, Burns said.
While many companies have ramped up self-service customer service options, such as FAQs and AI-powered chatbots, to boost efficiency, experts say businesses should ensure that dissatisfied customers can complain directly to minimize the number of negative reviews.
“Negative reviews are still bad,” Morowitz said. “But when things go bad, the human touch can make a real difference.”
