As time has passed, this is not so much about damage limitation (ring up all your customers that are happy and get them to post reviews so that a negative review is buried) and less about your emotional response to unfair criticism and much more about how to get yourself “back on the horse” so to speak.
I suggest you treat this as a business exercise and take the time to understand what went wrong and how to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. I don’t get complaints very often so when I do, it can go one of two ways: I can ignore it as most of my clients are happy, or I can analyse it (swallowing my annoyance and indignation) and try and understand what SYSTEM changes would have avoided the complaint.
I treat complaints as important feedback. If I had a consultant come and analyse my business to tell me how to improve, I’d expect them to mystery shop me and Id expect to pay for her report. So a customer complaint is potentially a very inexpensive way to get that valuable feedback and learn how to improve. Of course the expensive complaints are the ones that damage your reputation and cost you business. It’s important not to have too many of those.
The first thing is to gain some perspective. You do have to learn to manage knock backs because that’s part of the self employment deal.
The next thing is to understand who your customer is. In the case of young women, the customer is often the Mum, so you need to check in with Mum including customer aftercare etc. It’s good to know that people often complain and feel indignant on behalf of people that they care about - especially if they’ve organised the appointment. Sometimes the organiser is also your “customer”. Make sure that you identify all of the customers having a treatment and acknowledge them and ensure they are happy and informed.
What helps in these tricky situations is to have a system about how you deal with customers each and every time and not deviate from your system. For instance you may have a rule that customers should not arrive for their appointment wearing waterproof mascara, and you may also have a rule that you always take a before and after photo, and that you give out an aftercare card, EVERY SINGLE TIME. Customer complaints help you identify where you can make a system change.
You can call your system, your company policy, and you can put your company policy up on your Facebook, website etc. And you can quote it.
“It is our policy to take before and after photos and show them to our customer to make sure they are happy with their treatment”. Is more powerful than “she looked in the mirror and seemed happy before she left”
You can also post a photo in a review. (There are a few issues about permission here which I won’t go into, but in general, if someone slated me unfairly across social media, I’d put a photo up to rebut them as my first response).
if you identify a couple of changes to put in place you will feel more empowered.
As for the rest, don’t worry about it too much. I’ve been slated on social media for a french manicure - most unfairly. I actually got more bookings with people looking at me earnestly saying that they had heard my french manicure was very good (!) and I ended up on the experience even though it was terribly upsetting at the time. Years later, one of my clients said that she’d read a very negative review and checked the reviewer out and found that she’d been very rude about every place she’d reviewed, so had discounted the review. Another person said that if you only have positive reviews people think they’re fake so if you have a negative review it’s reassuring that anyone can comment. Positive reviews are the ones that matter because people are always optimistic and hopeful.
And here’s a tip. Only work with people you like. Life is too short to suck up other people’s negativity. If you know that you can just say “I’m so sorry i tried my best to give you the experience you wanted” and never book them again, it’s quite freeing. And to be honest, you don’t want any of their yucky mates either, so how lucky are you that you’ll never see any of them again!
Your customers are your fans. They’re not passengers waiting for a bus, having to get onboard no matter what. They have chosen you. Not everyone is going to love you, so don’t worry about them. Just let them go find a therapist/salon that’s suits them better and concentrate on understanding the clients that do love you and focus your marketing on getting more clients like your best fans.