There’s no doubt about it, online reviews are crucial for your multi-location business. 82% of all American adults at least sometimes read online reviews before making a first-time purchase. A significant amount of reviews and an overall high rating helps you attracts new customers, boosts your local SEO, and improves your credibility. However, something even more important than your reviews is how you respond to them. In this article, we will explain the best ways to respond to your reviews.
Why You Need to Respond to Reviews
Customers are not only looking at the reviews, but they are also looking at how your business responds to them. Responding to reviews is incredibly important for attracting customers and building trust. The top benefits of responding to reviews include:
- Showing your attentiveness which helps encourage customers who had a good experience to come back.
- Demonstrating your commitment to customer service.
- Build relationships with customers.
- Transform negative reviews into positive ones and retain a customer who had a negative experience.
- Increase your SEO. Google confirmed that responding to reviews helps you SEO!
How to Respond to Positive Reviews
Positive reviews may not seem like they require a response, but a response can go a long way to build and strengthen your relationship with the customer. It is more common for people to leave a negative review because they have had a bad experience than it is for a customer who had a good time to leave a review, so acknowledging the positive feedback is important. When responding to a positive review:
- Include the person’s first name
- Thank them for the review
- Add some information that is personal and relevant to their specific review.
- Encourage them to come back to your business in the future
Responding to positive reviews is pretty easy, but keeping up with numerous reviews from multiple locations can get tricky and time-consuming. Using our software, Attract and Close can help you set up automated responses so you can respond to all of your multi-location reviews in some simple place.
How to Respond to Negative Reviews
Negative reviews can be very frustrating, especially if you believe they are unfair. However, negative reviews are often a cry for help and responding can help you transform a negative review into a returning customer. Here are some tips for responding to negative reviews:
- Take a deep breath and make sure to remain calm when responding to negative reviews.
- Be diplomatic and objective when assessing the review. Try to see the reviewer’s point of view and determine if there was something your business could have done differently.
- Always thank the reviewer for taking the time to leave feedback.
- Use context from the review to personalize your response.
- Apologize for their experience and accept responsibility when you should.
- Offer a solution and try to move the conversation offline.
- If you are able to resolve the issue, kindly ask if they would be willing to update their review.
Responding to reviews is absolutely essential for your multi-location business. Responding to both negative and positive reviews is important, but missing negative reviews can hurt your business even more. Never miss a review when you work with Attract and Close. Our experienced, results-driven team has the knowledge and tools to help you perfect your review management strategy so you can respond to every review. Learn more about how we can help you with review management, or schedule your free consultation HERE.