How to Respond To Reviews [Tips + Examples]

Often customers will turn to your review section to form an opinion about your product, so you want to make sure you’re putting your best foot forward. One way to do this is by responding to your reviews. It not only makes the customer who left the review feel heard, but it shows future customers that you care.

As a rule of thumb, your review replies should be personalized, concise, and most of all - kind. Let’s dig into a few examples of the types of reviews you should prioritize and how to respond to each kind.

Shipping mishaps

Some things are beyond your control and oftentimes customers will leave a negative review as a way of reaching out when something goes wrong. As tempting as it is to moderate this review out, use it as a chance to publicly resolve the issue and show future customers that they’ll be taken care of if something goes wrong.

Let’s take a look at this example of a review left by a customer who had difficulty with their delivery.

The brand nailed this response by letting the customer know what they did to resolve the issue and by giving a specific timeline and contact details.

Tips for a good response:

• Acknowledge the customer’s bad experience and offer a sincere apology
• Let the customer know how you plan to make things better
• Give the customer a way to follow up by providing contact info

Product defects

When a customer leaves a bad review due to a defective product, it’s super important to publicly respond as you want other customers to know this isn’t your standard product quality.

This review is from a customer who was slightly disappointed with the quality of their purchase. Let’s look at how the brand handled this.

The response here was great for a few reasons – mainly because it pointed out that it could be a product defect. But there’s also some informative product education for future customers, when she explained that the issue could be due to sizing.

Tips for a good response:

• Understand whether the customer’s negative experience was due to a product defect or something else
• Offer a solution and let the customer know what steps you’ve already taken to fix the problem

Constructive criticism

Oftentimes customers leave 3 or 4 star reviews even when there was nothing necessarily ‘wrong’ with their product, they simply just didn’t love it. Firstly these are great nuggets of feedback that you can use to inform your product roadmap. Secondly, it’s an opportunity to turn a moderately satisfied customer into an incredibly satisfied customer by offering a personalized suggestion that would improve their experience.

In this example, the customer explains all the things she liked about the product and explains where it specifically fell short for her.

This response does a good job of thanking the customer for their feedback and letting them know their voice has been heard. It also includes a suggestion of what the customer could do to improve their experience with the product.

Tips for a good response:

• Let the customer know their feedback is valued
• If possible, provide suggestions that could improve their experience
• Be sincere

Positive Reviews

It goes without saying that positive reviews are the best kind of feedback you can get. So take a few seconds to respond and let the customer know how much you appreciate them.

In this example a customer left a 5 star review and shares her experience about how she wears the hat she bought.

What we like about this response is how personalized it is. It acknowledges specific details about the customer’s review and goes as far as to sympathize with her. Of course you can follow a certain structure (i.e. thank the customer then address a specific detail), but you shouldn’t be copying and pasting a response. Customers can tell and it defeats the purpose of what you’re trying to do.

Tips for a good response:

• Address the specific details of the review - don’t just copy and paste a templatized response!!
• Be genuine and keep things concise

Setting up a system to respond to reviews

You might feel inspired to go and respond to all of your reviews right this second - which is great! But setting up a system to help you to respond to reviews consistently and in a timely manner is the key to building an engaging review section.

Junip's automatic review notification emails help you stay on top of negative reviews & our intuitive dashboard gives you an easy way to do it. Get started today with a 14-day free trial, or reach out to our team for a personalized walk-through of the platform.