How do I respond to a negative review?

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As a RatePoint user, getting your first negative review can be nerve-racking. It's OK; take a deep breath, assess the situation, and everything will be all right! You'll have ample chance to respond and attempt to resolve the issue -- or if it's simply a fraudulent/spam/obscene review, you can "flag" the dispute and we'll delete it from our end upon review.

When a 1- or 2-star review is submitted, that's only the beginning of our "Dispute Resolution Process." If you receive an email notification from us that you have such an open dispute, you'll want to log into RatePoint first. If you click the Reviews -> Business Reviews tab, you'll see options to view/manage your disputes:

Clicking this will show you a list of all your recent disputes. Then click "view details" next to the one you want to act upon:

Clicking "View Details" will then give you 3 options, as shown in the screenshot below. Note that during the entire Dispute Resolution process, the negative review remains hidden from the public. If you don't respond within 7 days of the dispute being opened, though, it will be published automatically at that point. So, your options are as follows:

1. Respond to consumer: This gives you the opportunity to write a private response to the reviewer. Keep it short; a few sentences typically will suffice. You're just starting a dialog here; resist the urge to write a "checklist of refutes." You shouldn't try to logically shoot down their whole argument, just try to clarify what happened and try to find out what you can do to make it right.

Once you make an initial response, the reviewer will then have 7 days to respond to you. If they don't respond to you within 7 days, the review is closed in your favor -- it won't count towards your score and it will never be seen publicly. But, if they do respond, you have 7 days to respond to them, lest the review close in their favor -- and so on.

The reviewer can only choose to publish a review by marking it as "Unresolved," but they'll only have that option once they've responded to the business through 8 rounds of communications. We want to see that both sides are actually working to resolve an issue.

In many cases, the reviewer will go through the whole process, adamant that they are still unhappy and want their review posted. As long as they're a legitimate customer of yours, telling their honest experience, and they've gone through 8 rounds of "Dispute Resolution" responses with you, the review will have to be posted if the reviewer chooses so. However, you'll always have an option to write a "Management Response."

2. Your second options is to simply choose to "accept" the review, at which point you'll be able to write a public "Management Response" immediately, as shown below:

If you suspect the dispute resolution process will be futile, or even if you just feel that the review is justified, simply accepting the review, then writing a public response, is often the easiest option. Also, negative reviews are not always a bad thing -- you can't get 100% positive reviews all the time; it's just not. A negative review or two adds miles of credibility to your reviews, and can often notify you of shortcomings that people otherwise would be unlikely to tell you about face-to-face.

3. The third option is to "Flag for review." Choose this option if the review is spam, slander from a competitor, obscene, or not from a real customer. If this option is clicked, a member of our review auditing team will review the case, and determine if the review violates our guidelines -- if it does, it will indeed be deleted. If we decide that the review you flagged doesn't really violate our guidelines, you'll be notified that you still need to try to respond to the customer.

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