If your business has been trading for a number of years then you’ve probably received a bad review, if this hasn’t happened to you yet then I promise that it will do eventually.

So what should you do this happens?

You could politely ask the reviewer to take it down. This did work for a friend of mine recently. The reviewer wasn’t a customer of his- just someone who writes bad reviews for fun.

You could ask the platform to take it down. They’ll probably say no. But it’s worth a try.

You could take legal action if the review is libellous. The reviewer would have to have the means to pay. This could be a long process. A letter from your solicitor might be enough for them to take it down.

You could just ignore the review. If you have 99 fantastic and one awful review on Google, people will just ignore it anyway.

What you shouldn’t do is respond aggressively to the review.

Surprisingly, lots of businesses do this.

But it’s not going to help.

You will not come out of this with any credit. You’ll probably look unprofessional (at best).

And the messages could go back and forth forever.

DON’T RESPOND!