Whether you’re handling reviews for a couple of locations, or for hundreds or thousands, you probably don’t want to come off as the brand that doesn’t care what customers think.
To ensure consistency, and quality, you’re going to need some sort of process.
This could mean replying to all reviews from your phone, with easy access to context, or setting up complex operations, with or without AI, to get the right person to reply to each review.
The first question that comes to mind is probably what reviews you should be replying to, if any. But I made that the last question in this post, because it really depends on all 4 previous questions.
Let’s dive in!
Who should be replying?
This decision can be looked at under two dimensions. In that order:
- What would be the most effective way to communicate with the customer?
- What is operationally feasible to ensure brand consistency & high quality replies?
Who has context over the customer’s experience
If your customers have a dedicated point of contact, it’s probably best to outsource customer review replies to them.
They know the customer, and they’ll have a lot of context over what’s going on with that client account. A lot more anyway than anyone else in the company.
A good rule of thumb here is whether you can incentivize your team members to get reviews. If you can, there’s a solid chance they should be doing the replying. This applies to tours & day trips in the tourism industry, to waiters in some restaurants, to account managers in the SaaS industry, etc.
In that case, there’s two options basically:
- They requested the review (or feedback) in the first place, and need to be aware – and show it by replying – when the customer has fulfilled their request.
- They did not request the review (often negative). For a customer with a dedicated point of contact to feel the need to go on a public platform to share their frustration, there likely is a communication breakdown. At that point, the only objective should be to re-establish communication. First, identify the client. Second, understand what happened. And third, re-establish communication (i.e. call the client, escalate internally, etc) if the business relationship is on-going, or try to ensure this can’t happen again and communicate with other members of the team.
If there is no dedicated point of contact, and multiple people from your organization talk to a single client, like you’d often see in hotels, marketplaces, etc, then the brand carries a lot more responsibility over customers’ expectations.
This poses two significant challenges:
- It can be a lot more difficult to get context over what exactly happened.
- It’s important to still humanize the business relationship as much as possible. Avoid using “we” in replies, or signing with “The XYZ team” at all costs.
Whether a single person is responsible for replying to all reviews or multiple team members, you’ll want them to know what happened, sign with their name (or an alias if needed), and take personal ownership in their replies.
How can you make this work operationally?
As much as it’d make sense for everyone owning the customer relationship to reply to reviews, they might not have the time, or the tools, to consistently post high quality replies.
And it’s challenging to figure out who owns that relationship.
Luckily, we’re in the 21st century, so there are a few things that can help here.
- You can use software to identify member names in the reviews. This is a hack we’ve seen a lot in the hospitality & tourism industries, where customers are asked to mention the person taking care of their business by name in the review. Review management software like Reviewflowz can help extract that name from new reviews to notify the right person internally.
- You can also use software to match customer usernames on public review platforms with your customer database. While this doesn’t work all the time – anonymous reviews, obscure google accounts from the 90s, etc. – it’s a solid way to save time in the vast majority of cases.
- You can use AI to suggest replies that your team members only need to edit. This helps with spelling & grammar, and it also helps keep a consistent brand voice across multiple replies, posted by many different team members.
- You can use software to make it easier to reply, so that your team members don’t have to log into review platforms, share credentials, struggle to find the right review to reply to, etc.
It will still fall on every team member to take ownership for customers’ reviews, and reply regularly. This requires oversight, efficient internal communication, and accountability on the part of people replying for the experience.
If you think distributing review replies wouldn’t work for your organization, you can centralize instead. In that case, the challenge is much more about getting information about the customer’s experience to the person in charge of replying.
- I’ve found that leveraging internal communications software like Slack or Microsoft teams helps a lot with that. Each review becomes a conversation, where the person in charge of replying can ask for information, and help in crafting a thoughtful response.
- You can also leverage automation here, to identify the client, and pull information from your CRM, helpdesk, etc.
- AI can also help reply automatically or semi-automatically – at least for the “easy” cases, to ensure the person in charge doesn’t get drowned in repetitive, low value-added review replies – which tends to result in copy-pasted half-baked templates, and really shows on a review profile.
While there are operational solutions in both cases, it’s important not to neglect individual accountability and “review fatigue” to ensure consistently strong answers.
How fast do you need to reply?
As fast as possible if you want to (re)-engage the customer.
Thanks, Captain Obvious.
But having the right information before you post a reply is crucial.
On Google, and on most review platforms, customers will be notified when you reply for the first time, and not when you update your reply.
And we’re trying to re-establish communication here right?
So replying automatically with an unconvincing template minutes after the review was posted will have the exact opposite effect to your objective. The customer will likely feel like there’s no opportunity to fix the problem.
So there’s a fine line between replying fast, and replying well.
What I’ve seen work best is to have a sort of clock on negative reviews. For example, we want to reply within 2h to a negative review.
With proper review monitoring systems, you can route the review to the right person, automate as much information gathering as you can, and reply without being in the heat of the moment, with a constructive message.
The first reply could even mention that you’re still gathering information about what happened and will be in touch with the customer in the next few hours to find a positive resolution.
No matter what you do, do not reply automatically to all reviews within minutes, thinking you can still update that reply later. You can, but the customer who posted the review will likely never know about it, and only think your company didn’t value them enough to actually look into what happened.
How much can you automate?
The easy answer is you can (and should probably) automate everything that is not directly linked to customer communications.
Notifications, reporting, data enrichment to get context, etc. are all things that can and should be automated.
When it comes to automating customer communications, the challenge is a lot greater of course.
What I like to think is the degree of automation should depend on the degree of customer engagement.
I think it’s fine to reply automatically to 5 star reviews with no content like we often see on Google. But if a client spent a solid 10 minutes reviewing your company on platforms like G2, Gartner, etc. you’re probably going to want to have some sort of human oversight over the reply that goes out.
It’s good practice however to implement some sort of consistency in the reply process. Most companies use templates.
The main challenge with templates is it can really show. That’s where AI can help, by suggesting replies that are originally crafted each time using the review content, while following a consistent structure to make sure the main points are touched on, and the brand voice is respected. Not to mention spelling & grammar, etc.
What makes a good reply?
When working on reply suggestions and auto AI replies at Reviewflowz, we went through thousands of review listings, across many different platforms, to look into what makes a good reply.
The structure we recommend now for almost every client is the following
- Thank the customer for taking time to share their feedback
- Acknowledge their feedback by rephrasing it.
- Share some context about what your company is doing about that.
- Suggest next steps
Replying to a positive review
Thank you Shaun, for sharing your feedback about your experience with XYZ.
It’s awesome to hear that you enjoyed the Sushi.
We source our fish locally at the XYZ market and we like to think it makes all the difference! 💪
Looking forward to welcoming you and your family again, be sure to try our Sashimi special next time!
Replying to a negative review when you know what happened
Thanks Shaun for letting us know about your experience yesterday.
I’m so sorry to hear you had to wait for so long before we took your order.
One of our team members got sick yesterday and we didn’t have time to find a replacement. This isn’t how we normally operate, and I deeply apologize for the wait.
I’d love to make things right if you’re willing to give us a second chance. Please give us a call or shoot me an email on axel@sushi-restaurant.com
Replying to a negative review when you don’t know what happened
Hi Shaun, thanks for taking time to share your feedback.
I’m so sorry about what sounds like a terrible experience.
I reached out to our restaurant manager Lenny to understand what happened yesterday and make sure this doesn’t happen again.
If you’re willing, I’d love to get more information from you and see if we can make things right. Please give us a call or shoot me an email on axel@sushi-restaurant.com
Replying to fake reviews, competitor reviews, factually wrong reviews, …
Look, we all get those. My advice here is to take the high road.
If you feel like it, you can take a humoristic approach, but the main thing to keep in mind is that the average reader will not know who to believe.
It’s your voice against theirs, and that can cut both ways.
So humility is your best friend, in most cases.
Hi Shaun, thank you for sharing feedback here about your experience at XYZ.
We source our fish locally at XYZ market every morning, and we’ve never had a case of food poisoning in 15 years of business.
We take this very seriously, and I’d very much like to get to the bottom of this.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a record of your reservation. Could you please give me a call or shoot me an email on axel@sushi-restaurant.com?
When should you reply?
You’re not going to like this, but ideally, always.
Not at all cost though, and that’s where things get a little more complicated.
Some companies are so focused on replying to all reviews that their review listings end up looking like an endless list of “Thank you but we don’t really care” replies. Which is the last thing you want to do.
More often than not, the answer is in granting the right degree of autonomy to your team, while enabling them to save time on low-value tasks with the right tools & automation.
