SMS for Reviews: Responding to Online Reviews

Earning reviews is crucial for growing your business—but the work doesn’t end there. Responding to feedback is also key to maintaining your online reputation.

Here’s why and how you can make a big impact responding to online reviews.

1. Why You Need to Respond

Your responses to feedback dictate whether new customers choose to work with you.

Responses also sometimes determine whether previous customers come back. Other benefits of responding to online reviews are:

Boosting existing customer loyalty
Learning what to improve from critical feedback
Finding a chance to win customers back when they share negative feedback
Attracting more new customers

Responding to negative reviews is especially huge when you do have a solution ready for a customer who was just confused about what you have to offer. You get to publicly save the day, delight the customer, and prove your customer service is on point!

2. Response Best Practices

You ideally want to respond to reviews as soon as you get them.

If you aren’t on top of things, you may lose both that customer and potential new customers who are viewing the interaction. Some other common mistakes to avoid when responding to online reviews are:

Only responding to positive reviews, or only responding to negative reviews
Responding with a boilerplate or unhelpful robotic template
Pushing the conversation to a phone call
Not addressing actual critical feedback
Attacking the reviewer

Remember you are always representing your brand—not just an individual employee. Staying calm, even if you feel a negative reviewer doesn’t deserve it, will always be the best look for your business.

A quality response—whether the feedback is positive or negative—will directly address the customer by their name, thank them for their time, acknowledge specific parts of their positive feedback, and remind them you’re available for any future needs.

3. How to Monitor New Reviews

You need to actually know when new reviews come in to respond.

That’s why we recommend getting a platform to manage and monitor all your reviews from one place.

Text Request connects to your Google My Business, so you only need to check one place whenever new reviews come in. You can then directly respond to those same reviews from inside Text Request.

This way you never miss out on an opportunity to make a positive impression with consumers!