While I was working on this exact webpage, I received an email from a client saying, “Thank you for your great service. I don’t understand the negative reviews online for you.”   He didn’t bother leaving a review himself, but the mention of negative online reviews got me thinking that it might be a good idea to address the problem with “bad reviews”.

Dealing with upset clients is part of doing business.  But why do some places have so few negative reviews?  Is it because they never mess up and nobody has a bad experience dealing with them?  Of course not!  Every company will occasionally make mistakes or have a bad day for whatever reason.  Even if they never failed, they’d still run into trouble, because a certain percentage of the general public will be difficult and unreasonable no matter what, and love to leave bad reviews when their unrealistic expectations aren’t met.  It’s a mathematical impossibility to please everyone all the time, so some bad reviews are inevitable.

But there’s a way to cheat the system: in the same way that money and coercion can make good reviews happen, money and coercion can also make bad reviews go away.

Many businesses choose to “compensate” unhappy clients in order to avoid bad online publicity.  It usually makes more business sense to pay off an unreasonable client than to insist on negotiating fair resolution.  That doesn’t mean they’re a good company and that they only have happy clients – it just means they’re willing to pay their dissatisfied clients to shut up.  Most unhappy clients would choose $100 in their jeans over the satisfaction of writing a hurtful review.  

If that doesn’t work, a business can intimidate people into removing their bad reviews.  I know a small business owner who pays a lawyer to track down people who write bad reviews and threatens them with legal action, which she says always works. 

If all else fails, a company can hire a reputation management company that specializes in cleaning up a company’s online image.  Although there’s no way to convince Google to remove bad reviews themselves, there are internet experts who know how to make things disappear.  That’s right, there’s a way to “pay for poof”, and make things vanish off the web. 

So be careful not to judge a company entirely on its ratings.  Too many good reviews with too few bad reviews might be more of a red flag than a good sign.

Hot Tubs Galore does not pay or coerce anyone to remove a bad review.  It is what it is.  I just ask that you take the time to read our responses if you’re curious about our worst reviews.