Ok... I know the obvious answer... do a better job of keeping your customers happy Unfortunately there was an issue whereby a technical issue seriously affected our companies service. A few listings appeared in the top ten which were negative reviews of our site on the back of this issue. One is in position 4 for our company name and there are two others appearing a little bit further down the top 10. Does anyone have any advice or similar experience?
What you're talking about is called Reputation Management and there are SEO/Marketing firms that specialise in it. Basically, you've got no control to remove anything from serps, all you can do is get some good reviews, and optimise them to the nth degree so that the bad ones get knocked down the listings. Also, if possible, answer the bad reviews, explain it was a temporary problem, offer reparation if feasible to people affected, so that people reading the bad reviews can see that you're basically a good company with standards in customer service.
Fennman, you need to add 10 positive feedbacks of your company and the negative one will fade away to page 2... Little better you can do here.
Get your company's name (or the search term you're interested in) on pages in other websites. Either other review sites, business listings, who's who type sites, myspace, blogspot, Wikipedia, and other "Google respected" sites. Preferably on sites that give you an individual page that profiles your site. If you can find that type site in your industry or niche that is even better. Then once you've got your company listed on the other sites get a few links back to them. This will cause them to rank for your company name and push the negative sites down.
As every one advices, you need to create more pages on different domains / subdomains with good reviews.. optimize them instep to out-rank the bad ones