Marketing & Promotions
4 Tips For Responding to Negative Restaurant Reviews
Lenny DeFranco
5 min read
Jul 15, 2024
Lenny DeFranco
5 min read
Jul 15, 2024
If you’ve been in the restaurant industry for any amount of time, then you know that the customer impulse to punish bad service often overtakes the urge to reward the good. Even the most buttoned-up restaurants can’t please everyone. At some point or another, you’re going to deal with your share of negative online reviews.
Don’t worry. It happens to everyone.
But how you monitor and respond to guest feedback can be the difference between saving a relationship and permanently burning a bridge.
A staggering 93% of consumers use reviews to determine if a local business is good or bad before they even set foot in the door. They’re also more forgiving toward restaurants that respond to criticism. As many as 45% of consumers say they’re more likely to visit a business if it responds to negative reviews.
This means that keeping a pulse on guest sentiment is vital for reputation management. Below, we’ll discuss the importance of responding to all reviews and how to publicly address restaurant complaints before they become a problem.
The key to responding to a negative review is to follow this simple formula:
Here’s an example of what that might look like:
“Hi, Jenna! We’re sorry you had a bad experience, and we would love the chance to make it right. Please share the details of your experience by emailing us at email@yourrestaurant.com. We’ll make note of your feedback, share it with the team and use it to ensure your next reservation is enjoyable. Thank you. - Tim, General Manager.”
The customer might accept your apology and take you up on your offer, which would be great. But what’s most important is that other customers see that you made an effort to take responsibility and mend things. To show guests that you care about their experience, keep your review response pleasant and empathetic.
Ideally, you respond to all positive reviews and negative reviews quickly and in detail — whether they voice their opinion on Yelp, Google, Facebook, or TripAdvisor.
You could set up Google Alerts for your restaurant name or track social media mentions to monitor your online presence across each food review site, but this can quickly become overwhelming.
A better option is to use reputation management software to proactively track, measure, and respond to customer reviews in one location (more on this below).
However you decide to go about it, engaging with negative reviews is an important part of showing the online community that you take all feedback about your service seriously.
Here are four tips for responding to negative reviews effectively.
Whenever possible, try to respond to reviews within 24 to 48 hours. Avoid the canned responses and opt for quick personalization that makes the guest feel heard instead — our response formula above can help with this. Integrating a review aggregator can help your team manage responses and give priority to the less-than-stellar ones.
For example, SevenRooms’ online review tracking tool will send an aggregated daily summary of reviews across all channels, and you can respond to guest feedback directly from your reputation dashboard as soon as someone mentions your brand online.
Unfortunately, you may encounter a customer who exaggerates or outright lies about a situation to get your attention. In the controlled chaos of dining service, many versions of the truth are possible. To ensure you protect your staff and address customer satisfaction concerns, take a moment to understand the situation at hand before issuing a public response.
If a bad review seems a bit off, do some investigation.
Talk to the staff who dealt with the situation and refer to your restaurant POS to see if you can identify any apparent issues. If the situation sounds plausible, explain why the mistake or problem happened and what you’re doing to avoid similar issues moving forward.
If you believe the unhappy customer isn’t telling the truth, don’t get defensive (the public is watching, after all). Instead, explain what transpired and where the miscommunication happened.
Keeping communications professional, even when a customer goes low, says more about your business values than the written blemish ever could.
All customer complaints should be handled with care and attention. That said, there is a difference between a customer with a low profile and one with a sizable following. And if a celebrity or influencer says something negative, you need to adapt your response strategy.
Acknowledge the complaint publicly, but try to take the conversation out of the public eye — and their followers — as soon as possible.
Regardless of who is in the right, work relentlessly to achieve the guest’s complete satisfaction. Why? Because even if this is a case where they’re trying to take advantage of you or exaggerating a misstep, you can use their prominent position to your advantage.
Once you’ve handled the situation offline, ask the customer to edit their original post to state that the issue has been resolved. Make your own social media content touting the (renewed) relationship you’ve begun with the customer so that the negative review turns into free advertising.
While it’s easy to get bogged down with the negative reviews, it’s important to acknowledge other feedback, too.
Peter Varvaressos, owner of the vegan restaurant, Vandal, also pays special attention to his 4- and 3-star reviewers by asking for a second chance from anyone who gives less-than-perfect feedback.
As Peter told SevenRooms, “It’s all about experience and hospitality. Don’t do one thing positive; do two things. You just shower them with hospitality until they have no choice. You’ll get them back.”
Using SevenRooms’ review aggregator, he links online reviews to guest profiles for staff to reference during their next visit. By tagging them as “VIPs,” “negative reviewer” or “second chance,” he ensures returning customers get special treatment that outshines any prior inconsistencies.
“One hundred percent of the time, we get those customers back. You can make a negative into a double positive.”
The occasional public smear is likely unavoidable, but there are ways to get ahead of the negativity. You can control the conversation offline before things go public.
With the right technology, you can take a proactive review approach through automated reputation management.
Send automated guest surveys encouraging guests to share feedback directly with your team, giving you a chance to respond before customers post online, good or bad.
To ensure consistent feedback, schedule them to send after any on- or off-premise experience, such as:
For example, Atelier House Hospitality uses SevenRooms’ automated reputation management tools to proactively collect and manage feedback — its monitoring powered by the SevenRooms review aggregator sources more feedback than Google Maps.
Proactive review monitoring powered by reputation management software
With customers increasingly turning to digital platforms to make dining decisions, restaurants can no longer afford to ignore their online presence. Reputation management — reflected through online reviews, social interactions and your response to customer feedback — has a powerful impact on your bottom line.
Only you can decide how you will respond to negative comments. At a minimum, you must commit to sending professional messages consistently. To learn how SevenRooms can help simplify your review management and manage your restaurant’s reputation, schedule a demo today.
Leverage AI to help you create review response templates you can quickly customize according to the star review rating. Use AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude.ai to formulate responses that address negative feedback and positive experiences as it relates to specific issues such as wait times, pricing or food quality.
When guests positively review your restaurant or say something nice about you on social media, add a note to their guest profile, so your servers can thank them in person with a complimentary gift.