If you want to skip the above video, here are some quick tips:
When responding to positive online reviews, you should highlight what makes your business special. For example a service based business responding to a positive review might say: “We’re glad you enjoyed our fast response time. Our company makes quick service a top priority and we even offers a $100 credit if we are more than 10 minutes late!” It’s also important you stay on top of your reviews and don’t have a large gap between the feedback and the response. Our review tool allows you to see all your reviews from over 12 review sites including Google, Yelp, and Facebook all in one place. You can even respond to all your customers directly from our platform:
In order to quickly respond to reviews you need to set up alerts and notifications for when new reviews come in. Many review sites allow you to do this manually. Another great option is to use our review monitoring tool. We monitor reviews from all major review sites and send daily, weekly, and monthly alerts and reports. Take a free test drive of our review monitoring service here:
Just like responding to feedback in person, there is no ‘one-size fits all’ template to follow. However, here are 3 tips to follow when responding to positive, online reviews:
- Length of response: This should correlate to the length of the feedback. If someone give you a 5-star online review, and simply says, “Great service”, then a simple “Thank you” is perfect. However, if someone writes a novel about every person they came into contact with and every step of the process, and the
look of your building, etc., then a more detailed response is appropriate. Try: “We are very happy to hear about your experience! We work hard to make sure our staff fits our company mission and culture, and our facility as well, so we are grateful to hear about your experience. Thank you for the support and we look forward to working with you again, soon.” - Sincerity: When responding to online reviews, it is of high importance to be sincere. If your response seems too over-the-top or ‘salesy’, then it is likely to rub people the wrong way. Also, if you copy and pasted your response on all of your online reviews, then it loses all possible positive impact.
- Personalization: Thank the customer by name. This plays to the sincerity tip, but using a customer’s name shows that the response is personal and you paid attention to what they said. As opposed to a template you copied and pasted from your Marketing Manager. In addition to personalizing it with the reviewer’s name, personalizing the response to the feedback is important as well. It is also a very good opportunity to highlight details about your company. Mike Blumenthal says it perfectly, “you can also add significant value for either the poster or future readers of the review by providing additional details about what you do or how you do it” You can read his example here, but in summary, he explains that a more personalized response allows a business owner to highlight features that the ideal customer will like, and also educate potential customers who will not. This will potentially save lots of trouble down the road, for both the business owner and the potential customer.