How To Handle Negative Reviews For Your Child Care Business

At times, our child care clients contact us about the best way to handle negative reviews on their Google listing and/or Facebook page. It’s an unfortunate circumstance to be in but we do have some suggestions on the best way to (1) respond to the negative reviews and (2) improve your rating on those sites.

First, it is important to respond to negative reviews in the most professional way possible, even if you feel like the comments are very unfair. It is important to remember that potential new parents will very likely review not just the negative review but also your response to the review. They will not know the details of the situation and won’t be able to decide who was in the right just from this brief review & response snapshot. So my best advice here is to take the high road, thank them for their review and state that you will be using the feedback to improve your child care services for the families you serve. If you get into ugly details, it will not reflect well on your business, even if you are truly in the right. You are being evaluated on how you handle an unhappy parent and the right response is always a professional and courteous response.

Some of our clients have asked how they can get negative parent reviews removed from their Facebook or Google reviews page all together. Unfortunately, I have never seen these attempts succeed because they are very difficult to prove or fight with Google / Facebook as fraudulent or unfair. So instead of wasting time trying to get them removed, it is best to overwhelm those few negative reviews with many more positive reviews.

The ideal scenario is that your parents leave reviews on those sites at a reasonable pace – say a positive review 2 or 3 times per month, every month. Your audiences there will want to see a continuous feed of spaced-out reviews over a good period of time. That will look better than 5 reviews submitted on the same day but then no more for 6 months.

On a future blog post, we will get into specific suggestions on the best way to request those important reviews.

Thank you for reading and we look forward to working with you soon on your child care website.