Time-Saving Review Response Tips During Holidays and Beyond

According to several studies, consumers expect a response to their review within 24 hours. Unfortunately, this expected response time frame doesn’t account for weekends, holidays, or vacations taken by the person responding to those reviews.

If you’re a multi-location brand, responding to reviews can be extremely time-consuming. You may be receiving hundreds of reviews a day. If you take a day off it can be hard to catch up. Thankfully, there are tons of great tools, tricks, and strategies to help you respond to customer reviews faster than ever while still creating a great connection with the user on the other side.

Here are our best time-saving tips for managing online customer reviews through the holidays, vacations, or just to take a few things off your busy plate.

Review Response Is a (Critical) Time Suck!

Before we get into the time-saving review management tips, it’s important to first understand how long it takes you to respond to reviews. The amount of reviews you receive a day varies by business. For multi-location brands and agencies, you could get upwards of hundreds, even thousands, of reviews a day.

Let’s say, on-average your brand receives 5 reviews a day at 20 locations. That’s 100 reviews a day. In our research and discussions with customers, we’ve found that it takes about 5 minutes to respond to each review if you’re managing reviews manually. This means it would take 500 minutes to respond to a day’s worth of reviews, or 8 hours!

It would take one person a full work day to respond to all the reviews for 20 locations. Imagine how many people you would need on your team to respond to the reviews for 100 locations or even 1,000 locations. Not to mention, what happens if you skip a day or a week?

That’s just too long to respond to reviews. Here’s how you can save time responding to your reviews.

3 Easy Time-Saving Review Management Tips

1. Review Response Templates

Time Saved: 2+ minutes per review

Implementing templates is one of the best ways to save time during your review response process. We’ve found that using templates to formulate your responses can save you a minimum of 2 minutes on average. For 100 reviews a day, you’re saving over 3 hours a day just by implementing response templates.

If you have yet to create review templates, here are some helpful guidelines.

Building Response Templates for Positive Reviews

Thank the customer – If a person complimented someone else in real life, they would say thank you; it is no different on the internet. Show them gratitude for their business and the time they took to write a review.

Get specific – Generic responses are alright, but touching on something specific to their review adds a more personal touch that customers will appreciate.

Entice them to come back –  Whether the business tempts them with a new product or just lets the customer know they can’t wait to see them again. Give them a reason to come back and bring their friends!

For Example:

“Hello [NAME],

Thank you for the wonderful review and for taking the time to share your feedback with [COMPANY].  Our priority is customer service and we are ecstatic that we met that mark! We look forward to serving you and your family again soon!”

Building Response Templates for Negative Reviews:

Apologize and thank them for their feedback – Negative reviews help corporations make changes to improve current business practices. Apologize for the unsatisfactory experience and thank them for giving honest feedback.

Respond appropriately – Remember that the conversation is public. Never blame the customer or attempt to argue with them.

Invite the conversation offline –  Don’t go back and forth with an unhappy customer on a public review site. Ask them for more details to ensure it doesn’t happen again and provide them with contact information so they can get in touch with customer service.

Short and Sweet – Don’t say more than absolutely needed. The idea is to handle the review as quickly and politely as possible.

For Example:

“Hello [NAME],

I’m sorry to hear about your disappointment with us, I would like to personally assist you with making things right.

Let’s get on a call and address this ASAP, we value your business. Please contact us at [phone/email] when convenient.”

2. Task Management Tool

Time Saved: ~1 minute per review

If you really want to save time responding to reviews, you need to implement a task management tool. Whether you’re using a task management tool specifically for review management, like Chatmeter’s Workflow, or a generic task management tool, you can save yourself close to two hours a day just by getting more organized.

Task management tools will not only remind you to respond to reviews but will help streamline review escalation and approval processes. Save time by drafting and approving review responses all in the same place. Notify the right people of changes in order to get review responses published in time.

A task management tool is also extremely helpful when returning from a vacation. This will help you stay on top of all your reviews. When every review counts, you can’t afford to let a review slip through the cracks.

3. Use a Reputation Management Platform

Time Saved: ~4 minutes per review

The ultimate time-saver for responding to reviews is to implement a reputation management platform like Chatmeter. Here’s how Chatmeter can cut the time businesses spend responding to reviews down to just one minute per review:

Review Monitoring – Keep track of all your reviews, ratings, and customer sentiment from every review site including Google, Yelp, Facebook, and more.

In-Dashboard Responding – Respond to all your reviews in one place.

Custom Response Templates – Create and store response templates.

Merge Codes – Use merge codes to personalize all review responses

Bulk Responding – Respond to multiple reviews at once.

Rotating Templates – Mix up your bulk responses by using rotating templates to respond to multiple reviews at once.

Pulse – Our text analysis tool is designed to help users analyze the sentiment of every review at scale. Cutting down the time it takes for you to read through all your reviews.

Workflow – Get alerts to new reviews, pending approvals, notes, and more. Never let another review slip through the cracks again.

Chatmeter can save you up to 80% of the time and money you’re spending on managing reviews. Don’t be afraid to take that vacation you’ve been putting off, or enjoy the upcoming holidays without stressing about all the reviews that need your responses. With Chatmeter you can take control of your review response strategy and accomplish more in less time.