How to reply to a review that is unfair

There is a particular kind of review that keeps you awake. Not the one where you made a mistake — those sting, but you know what to do with them. The one that keeps you awake is the one where the facts are simply not what happened.

They say you never turned up, when in fact you turned up twice. They say you charged double the quote, when the quote changed because they asked you for a different tap. They say you were rude, and you can remember the conversation, and you were the one biting your tongue. It sits there in public, with a star rating attached, and everybody who looks you up reads it.

The reply is not aimed at the person who wrote it

This is the thing that changes how the whole reply comes out, so it goes first. You are not going to convince the reviewer, and it helps to decide that before you start typing. People who post an unfair review have already told the story to themselves several times, and a reply from you is not a new fact, it's an opponent. In the rare cases where someone does change their mind, it happens on the phone, not underneath their own review.

Your audience is the next person who searches your name, reads three reviews and decides whether to ring you. That person knows neither of you, and has no way to judge who is telling the truth, and they're not really trying to — what they're actually doing is watching how you behave when someone is unfair to you in public. Once you accept that, a lot of the temptation drains away, because the long rebuttal with the dates and the screenshots wins the argument and loses the reader.

Correct the facts once, briefly, without heat

You are allowed to say what happened, as long as you do it in one or two sentences, flatly, and without a single word that carries any feeling in it.

Compare these two replies. First, the version most people write:

This is completely untrue. We attended on the 3rd and again on the 11th, as our records show, and the customer refused access on both occasions. The additional charge was agreed in writing before any work took place.

Now the version that does the job:

We came out twice, on the 3rd and the 11th, and the extra cost was for the second tap they asked us to fit. I'm sorry it ended up feeling like a surprise — I'd rather have sorted it out at the time. My number's below if you'd like to talk it through.

Both contain the same facts, but the first is a defence and the second is a person. The reader takes almost nothing from the facts either way, because they can't check them, but they take a great deal from the difference in tone.

Notice the small concession in the second one. "I'm sorry it ended up feeling like a surprise" admits nothing about who was right and still makes you look reasonable. That is the most useful sentence in the whole reply.

Keep it shorter than the review

A good rough test is that your reply should be shorter than the complaint, so if the review runs to a paragraph, yours runs to two or three sentences. Length reads as defensiveness, and it doesn't matter how calm the words are, because a wall of text underneath a one-star review tells the reader that this one got to you, and that you're the kind of business that will send them a wall of text too.

Never quote their words back at them in inverted commas, never use the phrase "as I explained", and never bring up another customer, another job, or how busy you happened to be that week. Nothing in the reply should sound like a warning.

When it breaks the rules, report it — and don't wait for it

Some reviews aren't really reviews at all. They are about the wrong business entirely, or they come from a competitor, or from somebody who was never a customer. A personal attack aimed at a member of staff is another, and so is a review left to force your hand while a payment is still in dispute.

Every major review site has a reporting route for these and it is worth using. Google's own guidelines for representing your business set out what is and isn't allowed, and reviews that break those can be flagged from the review itself.

There are two honest warnings attached to that, though. It is slow, often a matter of weeks, and the outcome is frequently "no action taken" with no explanation attached. Report it, reply calmly in the meantime as though it is staying up for good, and get on with your week. Treating the report as the plan is how a fortnight disappears.

Most unfair reviews have a small true thing inside them

This next part is uncomfortable, and it is usually true. Even in the reviews that are mostly wrong, there is often one real grievance underneath, wearing somebody else's clothes.

They said you never turned up, when what happened is that you turned up twice and nobody told them you were coming either time. The complaint about the price is really a complaint about finding out the price late. The rudeness was one short answer, given on a bad afternoon, that landed harder than you meant it to.

Finding that small true thing does two jobs at once. It makes your reply better, because you can concede it honestly and that concession is what makes the rest of you believable. And it tells you what to fix, which is generally a communication habit rather than anything about the work.

Very often the fix is that something was never written down anywhere: what a call-out costs, what happens when the job turns out bigger than it looked, how much notice you need. That's the gap we built hailera around — you write those answers once, check them, and publish them as an agent your website and the AI apps people now ask can read, so every customer gets the same version rather than whichever one you gave on the phone that Tuesday. A plainly written page of the same information does most of that for free, and if you haven't got one, that's the cheaper place to start.

Then let it sit

The hardest part comes after you have replied, when you will want to keep going back to see whether they have responded. Don't. Reply once and close the tab.

If they reply again, and they sometimes do, leave it. A reviewer arguing with themselves under a calm, short reply from the business makes the case better than anything you could write.

Meanwhile, the only real answer to one unfair review is a few ordinary ones around it, so ask the next five happy customers. Not to bury it — burying doesn't work and readers can tell — but so that what somebody sees is a business with a long, normal history and one bad afternoon in it.

One last thing to do today: take your most unfair review and write a reply of three sentences or fewer, then leave it in drafts overnight. If it still reads calmly in the morning, post it.

Sources

• Guidelines for representing your business on Google — Google Business Profile Help

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.