Rebuilding Customer Trust After a Period of Negative Reviews

Client Overview

Our client, a luxury bathroom retailer based in London, stands out with their proprietary design software that delivers exceptional speed, quality, and immersive VR previews. Despite these advantages, operational challenges and declining customer service team performance led to a critical erosion of customer trust. Faced with an onslaught of negative reviews that began to impact sales, the owner sought Belucidity’s crisis management expertise.

The Challenge

In today’s hyper-transparent world of online reviews, a few negative experiences can snowball into a major threat to a company’s reputation and customer acquisition efforts. Our client experienced a severe trust deficit, exacerbated by team turnover and industry-wide supply chain delays. These issues fueled customer dissatisfaction, generating negative online reviews that repelled potential new customers and disrupted sales conversions.

At Belucidity, we understand that rebuilding trust goes beyond damage control. It’s about establishing transparency, resolving root causes, and creating a proactive strategy to counterbalance the impact of negative e feedback.

We have covered the actions we took to enhance the approach to customer service and resolve the root cause of the patterns that led to the negative reviews in another case study. The details below concentrate on the action we took to remove the negative reviews and restore the previously good reputation.

Our Solution

1. Establishing the Scope and Prioritising Resources

We began by mapping out the extent of the damage, identifying all platforms where negative reviews had accumulated. This included well-known and active review sites, as well as overlooked platforms that had not been monitored. This thorough audit allowed us to prioritise where our resources would have the most impact.

2. Reducing Response Times and Implementing a Triage System  

We set up a dedicated triage team to immediately address customer concerns to ensure prompt initial contact. These temporary support members were trained to handle stressful interactions, manage customer expectations, and efficiently route complex issues to experienced staff. We also provided resilience training and on-the-job coaching to bolster their effectiveness.

3. Uncovering and Addressing Key Issues 

We identified common themes from the negative reviews, revealing that poor communication and unmet expectations were major pain points. Working alongside the client’s team, we also developed proactive communication strategies to manage customer expectations better, even when issues were difficult to resolve.

4. Review Platform Management

We crafted tailored responses for each review, emphasising the client’s efforts to address problems and ensure there was a perception that action was being taken.

We then leveraged our knowledge of review site policies and support services and successfully appealed/removed reviews that violated platform guidelines.

5. Negotiating Amicable Outcomes

We engaged directly with disgruntled customers to negotiate fair resolutions. By addressing their concerns, we managed to persuade many customers to remove or revise their negative feedback. Our emphasis was to gain trust and empathy for the challenges being faced and in a considerable number of cases, we were able to negotiate turning negative reviews into realistic and positive accounts of the full customer journey.

In cases where customers remained unreasonable, despite the action taken and investment made by our client in the remedy to their situation and would not remove the negative reviews, our expertise in review policy enforcement allowed us to have 87% of these remaining reviews removed.

6. Raising Awareness and Managing Expectations

We launched awareness campaigns to educate customers about industry-wide supply challenges, preparing them for possible delays and setting realistic expectations. This helped prevent new frustrations from brewing.

7. Driving Positive Advocacy

It was important to gain additional positive social proof to counter the negative perception created by the negative reviews, so we prioritised an aggressive review collection strategy:

• Implemented an outbound email and call program to request reviews from satisfied customers.

• Empowered all customer-facing staff to encourage happy clients to leave positive feedback at every touch point.

• Leveraged a Net Promoter Score (NPS) approach to identify advocates and drive repeat reviews across multiple platforms.

  
  

Key Outcomes

Over a focused two-month campaign, we delivered transformative results:

• 93% of negative reviews were removed, either through customer negotiations or review site policy enforcement.

• 63% increase in 5-star reviews across key platforms.

• Zero new negative reviews for the entire campaign duration and the subsequent 12 months.

• The company experienced 43% growth over the next year. While difficult to quantify the exact contribution of the review management strategy, this success would not have been possible without restoring customer trust.

Conclusion

Belucidity’s strategic approach to crisis management not only salvaged our client’s reputation and contributed to the foundation for future growth. If your business is facing a trust crisis, we can provide a strategy and hands-on help to quickly restore your reputation, one satisfied customer at a time.