Customers provide product feedback and insight. In return, they expect responses that demonstrate you’re listening. By responding to negative reviews, you can:

  • Increase consumer satisfaction and confidence
  • Manage expectations
  • Provide information about future product improvements to future consumers

Response guidelines

Negative reviews fall into these categories:

  • Actionable negative reviews—Reviews about a product or service issue that can be addressed.
  • Non-actionable—Reviews with an abstract grievance that are difficult to address.
Note: Use a keyword search to find negative reviews specific to a product category or individual product. Search using keywords that indicate conflicted feelings, for example, "I wish," "broken," or "difficult."

Choose a response interval that takes into account:

  • Volume of reviews
  • Availability of staff to respond
  • A routine interval that may be daily or weekly
  • When responding, be sure not to repeatedly respond to the same complaint. Instead, consider featuring reviews which address the complaint at the top level of your product reviews
  • Monitor reviews that point to potential liability issues.
    Note: These reviews should be flagged for further consideration by your company's legal department.

Best practice

A public response to an negative review shows empathy for the customer. When possible:

  • Avoid canned responses as they come across as impersonal
  • Provide a short-term solution:
    • Recommend a product better suited for their use case
    • Provide a customer care number, and suggest appropriate next steps for consumers with a similar issue
    • Share upcoming design changes for a product
  • If you can’t resolve problem cannot be resolved, apologize to the customer. Offer a coupon or refund as a gesture of goodwill
  • Be authentic and transparent

Apply filters in the Manage Content solution to find a review that needs a response.

Filter to find negative reviews

Follow these steps to find negative reviews that need a response:

  1. Sign in to the Bazaarvoice Portal .
  2. From the Portal menu , select Ratings & Reviews.
  3. In the list view, you can filter reviews a number of ways:
    • Choose a personal or shared filter from the Saved filters drop-down list.
    • Filter by date by selecting the Date filter. Select a pre-defined time period or specify your own date range.
    • Use the Search bar to search for reviews. For example, enter keywords like “broken” or “difficult” to find negative reviews. Press Enter.
    • Filter by Product, Content, or Moderation content. For example, select the Content filter and select 1 star and 2 star rated reviews to narrow down your search.
  4. Select Apply and close. A list of negative reviews appears.
  5. Select either the review title or View details to open a negative review. Learn more.
Note: To remove all filters, select Clear All.

Respond to a review publicly

Note: Only responses to Approved reviews are displayed publicly.

Follow these steps to respond to reviews:

  1. Sign in to the Bazaarvoice Portal .
  2. From the Portal menu , select Ratings & Reviews.
  3. Filter to find negative reviews.
  4. Select either the review title or View details to open a specific review.
  5. Read the review and enter your text in the Your response text field.
  6. Under Your response details, select Add details. The Add details section appears.
  7. Enter your Department name.
    Note: This adds credibility to your reviews.
  8. (Optional) Enter your public display name.
    Tip: The default response name is the last one you used.
  9. Select Save.
  10. To post your public response, select Add. Your response will now appear with the review on your site.
Note: Depending on your distribution package, the updated review can also be syndicated either to the site of a selected retailer or to all retailers in the Bazaarvoice Network.
Note: You can reply to a reviewer whose review has been marked as Rejected during the moderation process. Find out how to respond to a review privately.

Respond to a review privately

You may want to respond to a contributor whose review was Rejected during the moderation process. If this is the case, you will need their email address.

You can collect a reviewer’s email address in one of two ways depending on your setup.

  • Submission forms—If the reviewer entered an email address on the review submission form, you can see their email address under the Review contributor panel to the left of the review.
  • Site authentication—The reviewer must sign into your site’s authentication system in order to submit a review. The sign-in process captures the reviewer’s email address.
Note: A reviewer’s email address is considered personally identifiable information (PII). PII is redacted by default and can only be viewed by users who have been granted access to PII by the Account Administrator.

If you use site authentication, a unique Reviewer ID is associated with each user account. Locate the user in your customer database using the Reviewer ID. Then you can locate a reviewer’s email address from the database entry.

In either case, copy and paste the email address into your email client and respond to the review.