8 Tips For Overcoming Mistakes, Negative Reviews & Unhappy Clients + Quoted in “Special Events”
What are we supposed to do with negative feedback from clients? How do we handle one-star and two-star online reviews from unhappy customers? It can be scarey to get negative reviews when you own your own business serving the wedding and event industry because many of us are small, local businesses and sole proprietors. Today, we’re talking about how to handle negative reviews, mistakes, and feedback from unhappy customers with advice for businesses in the wedding and event industry.
We’ve all been there. You open up your E-mail and it’s those dreaded three words that every business owner doesn’t like to read: “In the future….” It always starts out the same. In the future, you could do this differently. Next time, you might want to consider doing it this way. There are all types of ways for unhappy customers, clients, and wedding and event business industry peers to give you and your business negative feedback that you don’t want to hear. But, the truth is, you most likely need to hear this negative feedback.
When you’re in the wedding and event space, handling criticism is harder than any other industry because you often develop a close personal relationship with your clients and customers. Learning that they weren’t happy with your services on what was supposed to be the happiest, most important day of their lives can be a hard pill to swallow.
To help you overcome negative reviews, I’m sharing my best advice for wedding and event industry professionals on what to do with criticism and more importantly, how to improve from it. When negative reviews come in from a past event or from an unhappy client - and we know it’s coming - here are my best tips for how to turn mistakes into a positive learning experience to get better and improve your systems and processes.
For more advice on this subject, be sure to read an article that I was quoted in Special Events Magazine about How To Handle Negative Client Feedback. In addition to my quote, other wedding pros give their advice on how to handle it when things don’t go as expected with clients or on the event day.
Here is my best advice for how to handle negative reviews and unhappy clients when you’re a business owner serving the wedding and event industry.
Tip 1: Care But Don’t Carry
The best thing you can do personally and professionally with negative feedback is to “care but don’t carry.” Learn what you’re supposed to learn from it and move on. You don’t want to ignore the negative feedback, but you also don’t want to obsess over it and let it ruin your day, your week, or your month. Worse, you don’t want it to ruin your next event or your next client.
Tip 2: Expect That It’s Coming
Be prepared for negative feedback. You can’t please 100% of the people, 100% of the time. Knowing that there will be a certain amount of negative feedback is normal, despite your efforts, which helps to take the sting off when it does happen.
You might not know when it is coming but trust that you will make mistakes and negative reviews will happen. You don’t want to get caught blind-sighted in thinking that you’ll never make a mistake, even if you’re a perfectionist or the best people-pleaser there ever was…even you make mistakes.
Tip 3: Don’t Waste It
Don’t waste negative feedback and not get better from it. If you ignore the negative feedback and get defensive, it will be a waste on so many levels. You can go through the phases of anger and disappointment, of course, and when you’re ready, use negative feedback to get better.
Use each mistake as a chance to improve your systems and processes, otherwise not only are you upset, but now you’ve wasted the opportunity for improvement.
Tip 5: Normalize The Negative
Negative feedback is normal for every business. Just because other people or peers in the industry don’t talk about it, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen to them too. It is very common and natural to receive negative feedback, just like it is very normal to receive positive feedback.
I’ve been in this business for over 15 years and I’m still learning, adjusting and getting better with every single client. I still come across new situations and new challenges. Just when I think I’ve controlled everything I can control, a new challenge comes along for me to learn from.
Tip 4: Pick One
Pick out one - even if it’s just one little thing - that you can learn from or do differently next time and consider that a success. Sometimes when negative feedback comes in, we run the risk of either ignoring it, chalking it up to the client’s fault, or ignoring it, hoping it will go away.
Even if the client is totally in the wrong, there has to be something that you can do differently next time, even if that one thing is to have clearer, more direct communication with future clients. Challenge yourself and your business to find one thing to change from each mistake. Even if the change or improvement is small, it’s still something…and that counts.
Tip 6: Say Thank You
Instead of being defensive when negative feedback comes in, challenge yourself to say “thank you” instead. It isn’t easy and it can feel extra uncomfortable, especially at the moment, to find the positive in the negative.
The chance for improvement is there, it’s your job to find it. Whoever pointed out your mistake or gave you negative feedback, just handed you and your business a huge opportunity to get better and that’s something to be thankful for.
Tip 7: Be Careful In Your Response
Sometimes when you get a negative review, especially the online kind, your public response can be the most important part. Never respond right away. I repeat, never respond right away. And you most definitely want someone else, like a trusted friend or peer, to read your response first before sending it.
If you feel like you owe an immediate answer, simply thank the client for their feedback, let them know that you’ll need some time to find out what happened and you’ll get back to them with a proper response soon. This will give you time to let your emotions calm down so that you can respond as a professional, not as a wounded, hurt person.
When you write something online whether, in an email or a public comment, it can be hard to walk back from that, so it’s important that you’re empathetic, kind, and professional, not a defensive wreck.
Tip 8: Let Them Know Specific Changes
Even if the change is small, when a client feels “wronged” by your mistakes they want to feel validated and that you took to heart their feedback. A simple way to prove that their concerns were heard is to let them know the specific changes you made as a result of their feedback.
So there you have it! My top tips for how to overcome negative reviews and criticism from unhappy clients. For more, be sure to reach the full article including tips from other wedding and event pros in the article in Special Events Magazine on How To Handle Negative Client Feedback.
If you’re a creative small business serving the wedding and event industry - such as a wedding planner, photographer, rental company, florist, invitation designer and more - and you need help with your online marketing, content creation (aka blogging), or your Pinterest account, please send me an email at info@juliannesmith.com or check out my done-for-you and training services for wedding pros. I’d love to work with you to maximize your creativity and the overwhelm and work with the clients that you want to work with!
For more tips and advice on the wedding industry, be sure to check out past blog posts and sign up for my weekly emails where I’ll send you all kinds of wedding business education nuggets in 100 words or less!