Why the reply matters more than the review
Nobody expects a perfect record from a trade. A page of nothing but five stars reads as bought to most people, and a single bad review sitting in a long list of good ones barely registers.
What does register is silence next to it. A prospect who finds a complaint with no answer fills in the blank themselves, and they fill it in badly. A short, specific, unbothered reply closes that gap.
How to write it
Name the job and the timeline, say what happened in one sentence, say what you did about it, and give a way to reach you. Keep it under a short paragraph and keep the temperature at zero.
Don't argue the facts point by point, don't mention what the customer owes you, and don't say anything about them personally. You're not writing to the reviewer. You're writing to the next person deciding whether to call you, and that person is reading for temperature more than for facts. A calm paragraph from you next to an angry one from somebody else settles the question on its own.
Then stop. One reply is enough. A thread of back and forth under a one star is the version that gets screenshotted.
When a review can come down
Google removes reviews that break its content rules: fake ones, ones from a competitor or someone who was never a customer, personal attacks, off topic content, spam. It doesn't remove a review because the business disagrees with it.
You can report a review from your Business Profile and Google looks at it against those rules. Nobody can promise a report succeeds, and most honest bad reviews stay up. Report the ones that plainly break a rule and leave the rest alone.
The one thing that makes it worse
Offering something to get a review changed or taken down is against Google's rules, the same as paying for a good one. It also tends to become its own review, in public, with a screenshot.
The durable answer is volume of honest ones. Keep new reviews arriving every month and a bad one from March sinks down the page on its own, next to a dozen recent jobs that went fine.