Negative Response Templates for Businesses in T&T

Negative comments are a common occurrence on social media. In fact, it is the first time in history that people and businesses are exposed to so much negative feedback daily.

If your company is online, you have or will get a negative response. Too often businesses in Trinidad and Tobago solidify their negative response protocol after the first one instead of having a planned strategy.

Being proactive about adverse responses is imperative to ensure you uphold the integrity of your brand and maintain good customer service.

Here are some tips and responses to handle negative responses on your page:

Firstly, you should always respond to negative comments. Specifically, those that highlight a problem that you need to address. Don’t take these responses personally, step back, look at them objectively and answer appropriately.

Your response must:

- Have a personalized touch

- Thank them for their feedback

- Apologize- as a last resort, but rather aim to resolve in the first instance.

- Address the issue directly

- Provide a solution

Each of these factors will be handled differently but you should let these five factors guide your response.

Not sure where to start?

Here are some templates you can use or modify for your business below:

Customer Service Complaint Response:

Customer service complaints are common in Trinidad and Tobago. In many cases, they cannot be resolved quickly but you should address them and notify the person of how you plan to rectify the issue.

Hi {customer name},

I am sorry to hear that this was your experience with our company. We understand that this must have been an unpleasant situation and shouldn't have occurred.

We have forwarded your message to our manager who is working to resolve this issue in the shortest possible timeframe. We will ensure that this does not happen again in the future.

We appreciate that you notified us of this matter. This helps us grow and make our company better.

Restaurants Complaint Response:

Food complaints are a bit tricky. In one way, taste is subjective so you can’t listen to every complaint about the flavour. However, you have to pay attention to the frequency of specific complaints and especially comments on the quality.

Thank you for your feedback, {Customer Name}.

We’re sorry that you were disappointed with the {insert product name here}. We work hard to provide our food with the highest quality possible but sometimes things happen that are out of our control.

Thank you for bringing it to our attention. We are always looking for ways to improve so we appreciate your feedback! If you would like to speak with a customer service representative, please leave your name and contact details and we would reach out to you as soon as possible.

Product Responses

Product feedback tends to require more information so you want to address the issue, express regret, and get the necessary information.

Hi {insert customer name},

We are sorry to hear that you had this experience with your purchase! We do offer free returns on purchases made within {number of days} day of the original delivery. We just need some additional information to ensure you are still eligible to coordinate the return.

Please visit our returns page here for more information. (Or please provide us with your order number and we will start the returns process).

Thank you for taking the time to give us this feedback, we appreciate it!

The responses for each company will vary depending on their industry however, these examples should give you a standard template that you can build on to create your response protocol online!

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