A Review Says Somebody Got Hurt. Do Not Reply Yet

"My mom slipped on the wet floor by your entrance on Saturday and we spent the night in the ER. There was no sign. Nobody even came over."

One star. Posted twenty minutes ago.

Your hands are already on the keyboard, because you know there was a sign, you are pretty sure somebody did come over, and every minute that sits there unanswered feels like agreeing with it.

Close the tab. This is the one bad review where replying fast is the expensive move.

Why this one is not like the others

Every other complaint on your page is about money or time. Somebody waited, somebody got charged more than they expected, somebody was rude. You reply, you fix what you can, and the worst case is that you look defensive.

An injury review has something else in it. There is a version of the next few months where a lawyer reads your reply out loud, and where the exact words you chose at 9pm on a Saturday, from your phone, while annoyed, become the first thing anybody learns about what your business thinks happened.

A review you leave alone for two days costs you a little. A reply that describes the scene costs you a lot more.

Make these calls first

Call your insurance carrier or agent first. Most liability policies have a notice requirement, and plenty of them want to hear about a potential claim early, whether or not anyone has actually filed one. Your agent will tell you what yours says. This call is not an admission of anything. It is the thing the policy exists for.

Then your attorney, if you have one. If you do not, this is a fine week to work out who you would call, because knowing the name before you need it is worth an afternoon even when the incident turns out to be nothing.

Then whoever was working. You are not building a story here and you are not asking anybody to remember it a particular way. You want to know what actually happened while the people who were there still remember it, and you want it written down with the date on it.

Preserve what exists, today

Camera footage is the one that gets away from people. Most systems record over themselves on a cycle, and the footage from Saturday may not survive to next Saturday. Pull it now and save a copy somewhere that is not the recorder.

Same for the incident log if you keep one, the schedule showing who was on, the maintenance or cleaning record for whatever is involved, and any text messages from that shift. You are not building a case. You are making sure the truth still exists in a month, whichever direction it points.

What a reply can safely say

When you do reply, and you usually should eventually, it is three sentences and it does almost nothing.

"I am sorry to hear about your mother and I hope she is doing better. I would like to understand what happened. Please call me directly at 555-0100."

That is a complete reply. It reads as human to every stranger who scrolls past. It contains no facts, no version of events, no defense and no promise.

There is a real difference between "I am sorry this happened to you" and "I am sorry we left that floor wet." The first one is decency. The second one is a statement about what your business did, published by your business, and you wrote it before you had seen the footage.

The sentences that cause the damage

Do not dispute the facts. "There was a wet floor sign right there and she walked around it" may be completely true and it is still the worst paragraph you could publish. You have now locked yourself into a version in public, on a page you do not control, before anybody has looked at anything.

Do not mention insurance, a refund, or covering anything. Not in a reply, not in a message, not on the phone in a way you would not want repeated.

Do not discuss anybody's medical details. If you run a medical or dental office there are rules about this that go well beyond bad manners. If you do not, it is still somebody's health condition being talked about in public by a business.

Do not say it has never happened before. You may not know that, and it invites somebody to go looking.

Do not name the employee who was working. Not to defend them and not to distance yourself from them.

Silence for a few days is a real option

Nothing requires you to answer within the hour. If you are angry, if you have not seen the footage, or if your insurer has told you to sit tight, then sit tight. A short, kind, factless reply two days later reads exactly the same to a stranger as one posted immediately.

The only thing you cannot do is post the angry version and delete it later, because somebody will have screenshotted it by then.

Do this

1. 1Do not reply on the day you read it.
2. 2Save the review as a screenshot with the date.
3. 3Pull and store the camera footage before the system records over it.
4. 4Call your insurance agent and ask what the policy requires of you.
5. 5Talk to the staff who were there and write down what they remember, dated.
6. 6Gather the cleaning, maintenance or service records that relate to what happened.
7. 7Reply with a short message that expresses concern, offers a direct phone number, and states no facts.
8. 8Move every further word about it to the phone or to your attorney, and keep it off the page.

Where the card fits

There is nothing a tap card does about an injury, and it would be strange to pretend otherwise.

What it affects is how much of your page this one review gets to be. A shop that collects reviews steadily has a page where a stranger sees a business that has served a lot of people well and once had a very bad Saturday. A shop whose most recent review is this one has a page that is about the Saturday.

That is the argument for a tap card from shop.optechsol.llc. It keeps the page current while you deal with the part that matters offline.

The short version

An injury review is the one bad review where a fast reply can cost you real money. Call your insurer, talk to your staff, and save the footage before it records over. When you reply, keep it to concern, a phone number, and no facts at all. Never dispute the story in public, never mention insurance or a refund, and never describe anybody's medical condition on your own page.