10 Best Practices to Manage Online Reviews for Your Multi-Location Business

With multiple locations across a geographic footprint, one misstep at one location has the potential to hurt your entire brand.

How do you mitigate this reputation risk? With a reputation management plan. Proactively monitoring and managing your online reviews is a critical component of a reputation management plan.

Doing this consistently builds trust, loyalty, and credibility across your portfolio and mitigates brand risk.

I've outlined 10 best practices to manage online reviews for your multi-location business:

1. Claim and update your business profiles: make sure each location's online listings (i.e., Google My Business, Yelp) are accurate and up to date with the correct contact details, hours, and services. There are lots of tools to help with this.
2. Respond to all reviews: train your local teams how to respond to good and bad reviews. Addressing complaints quickly can mitigate damage to the brand’s overall reputation. Develop templated responses that can be customize for specific scenarios. Responding to reviews also shows detractors that someone is monitoring the reviews and deters people from leaving flippant feedback.
3. Respond ASAP: aim to respond to all reviews within 24-48hrs. The faster you respond to reviews, the better. This avoid a small issue being blown out of proportion.
4. Personalize your responses: address the reviewer by name when possible and thank them for their feedback. For negative reviews, provide an email or a phone number and try to move the conversation offline as soon as possible. You don’t want to get into a public disagreement.
5. Encourage positive reviews: make it easy for your happy customers to leave reviews. Share links in follow-up emails, remind them at checkout, etc.
6. Avoid incentivizing reviews: it’s easy to fall into the incentive trap and vendors will try to sell you on all sorts of tools to automate this process. The problem is your customers can see right through this tactic. So, stay authentic and avoid incentives.
7. Address fake or unfair reviews: report fake reviews promptly on each platform. For unfair reviews, try to say calm and avoid getting defensive. Thank the reviewers for their feedback, provide an email or a phone number and try to move the conversation offline as soon as possible.
8. Turn negative reviews into opportunities: if there is a specific problem, try to resolve it for the customer. Done well, this can build trust and turn a detractor into a loyal promoter.
9. Set goals and track review metrics: track your baseline and set goals for improvement. Regularly review data to identify trends and monitor the performance of different locations. Be sure to share best practices and what’s working across your locations.
10. Use your best reviews in your marketing: make sure you get customer consent and incorporate your best reviews on your website, across your social channels, and in your advertising.

At Belle Bear Marketing , I have extensive experience building customized plans for reputation management.

If you're ready to take the first step and learn more, send me a DM and we’ll schedule a 15-minute call to see if I can help you develop a plan that protects your brand from a misstep at one location. ??