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By Maria Dorian, Co-Owner of The Funky Sponge, Owner of Task Away Virtual Assistants, and member of the ZenMaid team.
Two years ago, my cleaning business got a one-star review. It was the only one we’d ever received, and it sat there on Google haunting me more than I’d like to admit.
Every other review was glowing, but bad reviews feel deeply personal. This is our business, so it feels like a direct attack on my livelihood and my character, even though the writer of the review doesn’t think of it that way.
For months and years after, every time I pulled up our Google Business Profile, my eyes went straight past all the five-star reviews to the one that said we had completely let a customer down, and that she would never use our service again.
If you own a cleaning business — or any service business — you know the situation I’m describing. One bad review sits at the top of your search results and potentially influences how every new lead sees you. Worst of all, it hurts local service businesses like ours far more than most people realize or could ever be measured.
The Review That Haunted Me for Three Years
I want to be honest about how much this got to me. For three years, that review was in the back of my mind.
I did the productive thing first, which was to treat it as feedback. I dug into what went wrong and built new policies and procedures with my team so that the same failure couldn’t happen again to another customer. I’m proud of how much we listened to that review rather than dismissed it as a grouchy customer who had a bad day.
But the review itself stayed up, and I knew, from years of experience, that getting someone to take down a review is incredibly difficult. You can’t force it, and trying to buy your way into manipulating them to take it down — either through a refund or free clean — simply don’t work. Money back can never take away a bad experience. I’ve also been on the other end of writing a poor review, and throwing money or incentives at me doesn’t erase the experience I had.
As a business owner, you also can’t report your way out of an honest one-star. The common course of action is to respond publicly, move on, and bury it under new five-star reviews. I’ve even given that advice on a recent podcast with Stephanie Pipkin, who hosts Filthy Rich Cleaners and owns her own maid service, Serene Clean.
I did all of that, but it still bothered me.
Why I Finally Swallowed My Pride and Hit Send
Three years after the review was posted, I emailed her.
I didn’t know how this would be received, as she probably had moved on with her life and forgotten about my business altogether. Regardless, I drafted an email where I didn’t ask her to take the review down. I never even mentioned it as a possibility. Instead, I told her that her review was not left in vain.
I explained that we had taken it seriously, that we’d built new policies and procedures in our business directly because of what she experienced, and that I still thought about it. And again, I apologized for the way I personally mishandled her experience, and I acknowledged that we didn’t show up as the best version of ourselves for her. That was the whole email, and I expected nothing back other than again, wanting her to know that her experience wasn’t in vain
What She Wrote Back Broke My Heart
Her reply started exactly the way you’d expect — she repeated that she would never use our service again, and she meant it.
Then she told me why the review had been so scathing. When we let her down with a poor experience, her husband was on his deathbed with cancer. Our failure was like a punch while she was already down, during the hardest stretch of her life.
Reading that changed how I viewed the situation even further. I was very upset with the review and the experience our company delivered, but I had no idea what was going on behind the doors of her home. The bad experience she had with us landed on top of a crisis we had no idea was happening.
Her email didn’t end there, though. She thanked me for reaching out, even these three years later. She said she appreciated that I was so forthcoming about how we work every single day to make sure it never happens again.
Here’s a direct quote from her email:
“When I take the time to write a review (particularly a bad one, because I’d always rather write a GOOD review), in my heart I really want it to be feedback that can be heard and used (and, okay, some needed venting, too). That you heard and used it for the good speaks volumes about you. I’m VERY happy to know that it ultimately helped the business.”
…and then she took the review down, without me even hinting at it.
She also sent me a photo of her and her husband. He survived the cancer, and they’re both doing well.
The Review Is Gone, but I Won’t Let Myself Forget It
Here’s the moral of the story — I still have that email exchange on snooze in my inbox. Every couple of months, it resurfaces, and I reread it to remember what happened.
The review is deleted, but I want to make sure that the experience this customer had with us will never, ever happen to anyone else. That one-star review shaped our business more than a hundred five-star reviews ever did, and it was not written in vain.
What I’d Tell Any Owner Staring at a Bad Review
I’m not going to pretend there’s a formula that gets reviews taken down, because there isn’t. If there’s a genuinely fraudulent bad review, Google will remove it most of the time, but this was her truth, and we absolutely did let her down.
This customer removed the review a handful of years later because my outreach was sincere. I didn’t have a secret strategic motive behind it, though I hoped she would understand where I was coming from.
There are a few things I believe strongly after going through this:
- Treat the review as free consulting. Somebody just told you exactly where your business failed, so you need to build policies and procedures around it before you worry about your rating
- Reach out human to human. Assume that nothing will change, but tell them the impact their feedback has. Expect nothing in return
- It’s never too late. I waited three years, and if anything, the time that had passed proved I wasn’t just doing damage control
- Accept that some customers are gone for good. She will never hire us again, and that’s fair, but the closure and accountability were still worth it
- Keep the lesson in front of you. Whether you do what I did and snooze the email to resurface once every couple of months or leave it as a print-out in your office, don’t let a big failure like this become something you choose to hide from. It can actually do more good in the long run if you actively keep it in your mind. Use it as an accountability source instead
One-star reviews hurt, and they’re supposed to. But the gut-punch is only wasted if nothing in your business changes because of it.
Mine actually changed everything, including how I run my business to this day, and I’d take that trade again.
Maria Dorian is a Customer Support Advisor at ZenMaid and Co-Owner of The Funky Sponge, a maid service operating in The Villages, Florida, and Hot Springs, Arkansas. Maria also owns Task Away VA, a virtual assistant company, and previously ran a different maid service in Austin, Texas, for over 15 years and sold it for a $1.4 million run rate.
