How to ask customers to edit, update & delete reviews

The FTC is clear – businesses cannot alter, edit or change the contents of a review on behalf of the reviewer... but reviewers themselves absolutely can!

Customers submitting any review is a great opportunity for engagement.

If the review is positive, you have an opportunity to recommend other products or ask customers for more feedback. If the review is negative – it's often the case that your customer has a problem and is asking you to solve it.

According to BazaarVoice, 54% of shoppers say that if they write a negative review they expect a response from the company. Ideally they would have contacted your customer service team with this problem instead of posting about it publicly, but they were frustrated & wanted to make sure they were heard.

Them having a problem is good news – it means you can solve their problem & ask them to update their review.

How to know when a negative review happens

It's important to set up automated notifications to ensure you know when customers submit negative reviews.

Over email: most review platforms & customer engagement tools allow you to set up notification emails based on certain types of conditions. In Junip this is managed in notification settings – were you can choose to be notified of reviews with certain star ratings, or those with media.
In Slack: if your team is working in Slack, it's helpful to get notifications of new reviews were multiple people can see them. With Junip you can use Shopify Flow to set up this notification.
On your help desk: having your CX team aware of & taking action on negative reviews is the best way to ensure they're handled quickly. With Junip you can connect directly to Gorgias, or through Shopify Flow for other help desk platforms.

These are the three main ways we see businesses keep a pulse on what their customers are saying in reviews to make sure they can act fast.

How to ask customers to update or delete their review

Empathize with their problem: Jean-Louis Gassée, the former head of Apple France came up with the "Two Tokens" theory of customer complaints & we think this applies here. In every case where a customer is upset there are two tokens available – "it's awful"* or "it's nothing". In every interaction both tokens will always be played so whichever you pick up, you're forcing the customer to pick the other.

If a customer submits a 1-star review saying there was a stitch loose in their shirt & you write to say "that happens sometimes, can you remove your review" you're taking the "it's nothing" token & the customer must take the "it's awful" token – perhaps further updating their review to be even more outraged.

Whereas if you reach out to the customer & mention that it's horrible a stitch was loose in their shirt, you're thankful they noticed it before going out & are going to make a note to check with the production team to make sure they're double checking... the customer must take the "it's nothing" token. They'd seem insane otherwise!
If their problem can be solved, actually solve their problem: pretty straightforward!

If you nail both of these points – genuinely empathize with your customer & solve their problem, it'll be easy to go in for the ask to update their review.

How customers can update or remove their review

On Junip, the platform thousands of ecommerce businesses use to gather, manage & display reviews from customers, you can use Review Links.

Every business using Junip has a "Review Link" that customers can use to submit reviews for products they've purchased, and edit, update or remove reviews they've previously submitted. If you're using Junip you can grab yours here.

If you're looking for another platform, here's the documentation on how to edit reviews on Amazon, Google, Yelp (within 30 days of posting), Letterboxd, Some platforms like Yotpo & Okendo that do not allow customers to edit, update or delete reviews.

To get started with Junip, create an account: https://admin.juniphq.com/login/create

*"it's awful" was later updated to "it's the end of the world" in this retelling from Jason Fried, which further popularized the concept.