A potential customer who has never heard of your company will often look at its reviews before calling. They read a few good ones, then look for the worst one. What they want to see is how you behave when something went wrong. A calm, specific reply to a bad review can do more for that person than five good reviews with no replies.
Yet in many small companies, review replies are nobody's job. The owner replies when they have an angry evening, the office manager replies when they remember, and some reviews stay unanswered for months. This article describes a small routine that fixes that without taking much time.
Who your readers are
There are two readers for every reply. The first is the reviewer, who wants to feel heard. The second, and larger, group is everyone who reads the page later. The reply is a public sample of how you treat customers, so write it for them. That one idea settles most questions about tone: stay polite, stay specific, and never try to win.
Platforms also expect businesses to take part. Google, for example, lets business owners reply to reviews and describes replying as a way to show that you value customers (see Manage customer reviews). Check the current rules of each platform you use, because what you may reply to, report or remove differs.
Step 1: choose one owner and one deputy
Pick one person who is responsible for review replies, and one who covers their holidays. It does not need to be the manager. It should be someone who knows the services well enough to check a fact and has the standing to offer a fix.
Write down two more things: who may promise a refund, a redo or a call-back, and who must approve a reply to a serious complaint, for example one that mentions safety, money or a named employee. For small companies, "the owner approves anything about money or safety" is usually enough.
Step 2: agree a reply time
Reviews are not support tickets, but a reply after three weeks looks like neglect. A workable rule for a small company:
- Positive review: a short thank you within five working days.
- Neutral or mixed review: a reply within two working days.
- Negative review: a first reply within one working day, if possible after you have looked at what happened.
Do not reply while angry. If the facts need checking, a short holding reply is better than silence: "Thank you for telling us. We are looking into this and will come back to you directly." Then do it.
Step 3: reply to a bad review in four parts
A bad review is stressful because it is public and often one-sided. A fixed structure helps you write a reply that is the same whether you are tired or not:
- Thank them. "Thank you for taking the time to write this."
- Acknowledge what they felt, without agreeing to every detail. "We are sorry the installation took longer than you were told."
- Add one fact or one fix. "The delay was caused by a late delivery from our supplier. We now confirm delivery dates before booking a visit."
- Offer a way to continue offline. "Please call Anna on the number on our website, so we can put this right."
Keep it to four to six sentences. Use the person's first name only if the review shows it. Sign with a real first name and role, so the reply sounds like a person.
What not to write
- Do not share details of the customer or the job. Even if the reviewer posted them, a public reply with order numbers, prices or addresses looks careless.
- Do not argue about who was right. You may be right and still lose the public exchange. State the fact once, calmly.
- Do not blame the customer or an employee. Readers will judge your company by it.
- Do not paste the same text under every review. Identical replies look automatic and ignore what the person wrote.
- Do not offer compensation in public unless you would be happy for every future reviewer to ask for it. Move this to a private message or call.
If a review is clearly fake, abusive or about a different business, use the platform's way to report it, and reply briefly once if the review stays up.
Replying to good reviews
Good reviews need only two or three sentences, but not the same two every time. Mention something from the review: "We are glad the team arrived on time and cleaned up", not just "Thanks for your review". It tells future readers that the review was real and was read. If the review names an employee, pass it on to them; it costs nothing.
A weekly routine
Reviews tend to arrive on several sites, so a fixed time keeps the routine alive. Once a week, for fifteen minutes:
- Open each review page you use (see a Google Business Profile for a small local service company for how to set up the main one).
- Reply to new reviews according to the times above.
- Add one line for each negative review to a simple sheet: date, what was said, what was done. If it is a real complaint, it also belongs in your customer complaint log, so the pattern is visible after a few months.
Once a quarter, read the sheet. If the same thing appears three times, such as late arrivals or unclear prices, the fix is not a better reply but a changed process.
Asking for reviews
Replies work best when there are enough reviews to reply to. A short, polite request after a finished job is acceptable on most platforms, but rules differ, and offering rewards for positive reviews is usually not allowed. Ask everyone, not only those you expect to be happy, and make the link easy to find. The general idea and the risks of online reviews are summarised in Wikipedia, Online review.
A first step
Choose today the owner and the deputy, write the three reply times on a card, and save the four-part structure as a note. Then reply to the oldest unanswered review on your list, starting with the negative ones.
If your leads come from several channels and you are not sure which ones are worth the effort, a short look at how your marketing systems fit together can help; see our marketing systems service.
