These days, it’s incredibly easy for customers to share their experiences online and it’s not just restaurants who are being reviewed. Increasingly, more real estate agencies are finding themselves in the spotlight, making great customer service an area of increased focus for real estate agents.

These reviews are often located at the top of the Google search results which is a blessing when you get positive reviews and troubling when things didn’t go the way you planned with a client. The question then becomes, how do you handle less than stellar reviews of your real estate business?

The following 3 tips will help you when handling customer reviews:

Ask happy clients to write a review.  Ask clients who have had a good experience with you to post a review on Yelp or Zillow.  Don’t ask for any specific rating, as long as you did a good job the review should be overall positive.  Happy clients might not think to do this on their own, but unhappy clients certainly will.  So, this suggestion will help balance the scales a bit.

Respond to reviews directly.  Positive or negative, it’s a good idea to respond directly to reviews, if the site allows it.  When you do get a negative review, post a very professional response.  Offer a sincere apology, it doesn’t help to get defensive or go on the attack.  One bad review isn’t the end of the world.  It actually gives your review page more credibility, as most people won’t believe a page full of 5 star reviews is authentic.  Regardless of what the reviewer said, always thank them for their feedback.

Make Amends.  In your response to the negative review, ask the client how you can make things right.  People respect someone who is willing to fix their mistakes.  Ask the reviewer to contact you by phone.  If you are able to smooth things over, ask them if they would be willing to post an additional comment about how the issue was resolved.  If they don’t want to, you can go online and make a post that details how you resolved the issue.

There’s no doubt that the online reviewing system is here to stay and it’s making a major impact on businesses.  The upside is that you can learn from the honest feedback.  Participating in the review system also increases traffic to your site, which is always a benefit.  Handle your reviews effectively and you can make the online review system work for you.