How do you deal with 1-star reviews?
What do you do when your product or service receives a 1-star review without a fair reason?
If your product doesn't satisfy customers or it can't do something that you advertise, it deserves a thumb down.
However, I don't understand why some people just like to leave bad reviews on a product when they don't clearly know its features.
Instead of receiving a support ticket, I get a complaint about my plugin. Actually, it's not our fault. : https://wordpress.org/support/topic/doesnt-prevent-search-engines-from-indexing-useless/
It depends on the review...
satisfied customers can also add reviews to neutralize bad reviews.
The same
Plus as @arvidkahl and @robfitz mentioned in the podcast - 1-star review means that the person who bought the product is not the target audience. That's it.
Some of my best reviews started out as 1-star reviews. Usually, because my app was broken and needed a quick or lacked an obvious feature.
Always try to respond with empathy and diffuse any initial anger. I try to frame it by pointing out "how we might" improve the app and live by the phrase "either way, I'll take a look for any bugs in the code!"
Be sure to drop your email too - most people will follow up and appreciate the support.
One last thing... some people tend to get a lot of 1-star reviews about missing features... I can't help but wonder if maybe this is from trying to do too much. Do a small number of things well and I think you can avoid this. It matters how you frame the product and what products your users are comparing you to.
Thanks for your sharing. :) I'll take it into account
At first I found this to be stressful and it really bothered me. However, over time I've kind of come to terms with it and realize it's going to happen especially as you get more and more success.
For me personally, I treat these reviews as an opportunity to show off our companies support and I think of it as a marketing opportunity. I always respond and typically address the issue in the review. In situations where the user may not have reached out to support I mention it and I typically encourage them to reach out to our support staff for help. I try to be as helpful as possible and give any future readers a little window into how good we are at doing support.
I think most quality users recognize unfair (and in some cases fake) reviews. I think how you respond to the negative review shows a lot about your company, product and how you will support future users. The more you grow your product and business, the more likely you are to get negative reviews and this is why I've changed my approach and look at it as an opportunity to show off our skills.
Your opinion makes me open-minded to this kind of review now. I'll get angry and disappointed but in a few minutes. Then, I think the best way to recover is being patient and showing off our great support.
Don't get me started on app store reviews for iOS apps. Responding is the best way to go about it that way others can see your viewpoint. From my experience, you either have those who support you and love what you're doing (4-5 stars) or those who had one bad experience and want to let you know by punishing you on the review. Either way don't let it discourage you!
I'll keep in mind these words "don't let it discourage you!". Thanks Gina
Funny thing, I've been looking at reviews in great detail for a while.
Many low rating reviews actually miss the point quite often.
For instance, on a local online retailer's website, low ratings are often about the courier service instead of the product.
Sometimes people confuse a 1 star rating with 5 stars.... they might honestly believe one start is the best 🤷♂️
Then you also have to take into account the reviewer's mindset at the time, which you probably won't know. They could be dealing with life issues on their side and take it out on your product... This actually happens quite often, as people perceive things through their own constructed filters.
So, average everything out.
If all your reviews are bad, make a better product👍
People confuse about 1-star and 5-star reviews? This even confuses me more. 😂BTW who knows?
However, it's not fair when they have personal issues then release anger on others.
From the comment it seems, user might thought that, by default it may prevent search engine from crawl.
I agree with you. My product helps discourage search engine indexing of password protected pages only. And he might think that it allows him to prevent search engines of all pages.
However, instead of asking for support, he left a 1-star review. This drags me down. :(
People never know the pain of creating something. Negative people hangs around the web more. hard to deal with it.
It sucks to get such a review but try to look at it objectively. I'd bet for most website owners, a password-protected page sets the expectation of its content being unavailable to search engines. And once the expectation is there, it doesn't really matter what you write in your feature list, the disappointment will be there as well.
Disappointment always equals bad reviews. And satisfaction only sometimes equals good reviews. So with that in mind, I'd really consider including this feature as standard and thanking this user for pointing this out.
Had a look at your plugin page. I now see this feature is skipped deliberately as this is part of your business model. Well, it's your choice of course, but I think my point regarding expectations stills stands, so I'd consider mentioning this earlier on the page instead of hiding it away in the FAQ.
Even in your reply to this review, you don't make it clear that this is a paid feature. Don't be shy to ask for money in exchange for value.
Actually, I do offer a paid version. However, this feature is included in the free version. The thing is the tool helps discourage search engines from indexing password-protected pages only, not all pages on their site. I think that's what he missunderstood.
Well, if it helps, I didn't manage to get this information neither from the plugin page, nor from your response. I might not have read very carefully, but not everyone will.
This very comment I am now responding to should be what you reply to such reviews. When you address the misunderstanding directly, it helps in a few ways.
First, the reviewer might change their review as the confusion that made them angry is removed.
More importantly, this is your chance to show other potential users that your plugin is better than this review says. And when things go bad, you are there to help (and not 'discredit' the reviewer as someone suggested).
I am not even a potential user, and since I am here on IH, I am probably unconsciously inclined to take your side. Still, your response where you pressured the reviewer to say where they got such [stupid?] idea sounded rude, even if the language was polite.