How many positive reviews do I need to negate one negative review?

Short answer is 40. 

It’s no secret great customer reviews can drive sales for your site, just like a customer leaving a bad review can damage your company’s reputation. These two things are obviously correlated. What you probably didn’t realize that this crucial ratio between positive and negative reviews that(remove) may be even more important than the reviews themselves.

Consider these simple three facts:

1. When customers are dissatisfied or unhappy with a company, there’s a 91% chance they won’t do business with that company again (Lee Resources).
2. Unhappy customers typically tell nine to 15 other people such as friends, family, and co-workers about their experience; some tell 20 or more (White House Office of Consumer Affairs).
3. Surveys show that remove)   a negative customer experience is the reason 86% of consumers quit doing business with a company (Customer Experience Impact Report).

So what’s the secret ratio?

Studies have now shown that it takes rough 40 positive customers reviews to undo the damage of a single negative review. Wow! This ratio was derived from a combination of human behavior, math, and some simple logic.

Here’s the logic sited:

1. Unhappy customers share their experiences.
2. Happy customers, on the other hand, are unlikely to leave a good review.  In fact, studies show that only one in 10 happy customers leave a good review.
3. Your star review rating reflects an overall average of positive and negative reviews. So if your goal is to maintain an overall rating of four stars, you’ll need four, five-star reviews to make up for every one-star review.
4. So if only 1 of every 10 satisfied / happy customers leaves a positive, five-star review for your business, and you know it takes approximately 4 five-star reviews to make up for each one-star review, you realize it will take 40 positive customer experiences with your company to make up for that single negative review.

All of this makes for a positive review-to-negative review ratio that is virtually impossible for your business to ignore. Our services can help you get a handle on this by providing the tools necessary to generate more online reviews.