Customer reviews are critical to your business. At a time when 93% of consumers base their purchase decision on reviews, actively managing and responding to reviews is no longer optional.
In this article, we’ll focus on how you can respond to positive reviews for your business to build an engaged community of brand advocates for your business.
What Is a Positive Review?
First, let’s start with learning more about the elements of a positive review. Four components typically make up a positive review. Understanding these components is essential to crafting a thoughtfully worded response and build on positive customer interactions.
The four elements are: Experience, Response, Helpfulness, and Advice.
So, let’s look at the first element – Experience. Here, the customer is reviewing their overall experience of interacting with your business/organization. The customer will talk about how they felt when visiting your business. The customer experience is driven by multiple factors including their expectations, psychological health, past experiences, etc.
Response, indicates the way your business delivered the customer experience. The consumer will discuss in the review what happened when they shopped at your store, met with your staff, or purchased your services. In a positive review, the consumer will highlight how your employee responded during their visit and ultimately if they felt “heard”. More times than not, the response is a direct lead-in from the overall experience. Their response is the action points of their overall experience.
Helpfulness is another key element. Look at the review and see how the individual provided details of the experience. Did they mention a particular employee going out of their way to help with the shopping experience? Do they point out how easy it was to find products or locate services? These elements are helpful when crafting your response to the review. The way you acknowledge this review can be a huge driver to how other’s will perceive your brand. If an employee was mentioned, shout out that employee for doing a great job. Acknowledge that your brand cares about your employees. Additionally, while this does make your company appear more friendly, it also shows your employees that you were receptive to how they treat your brand. Your employees are the face of your company, be sure to reward them for their hard work, publicly.
Advice is the final element. What type of advice does the consumer provide in the review? Is the advice geared towards other shoppers or your employees? Perhaps it covers the management team and how they could offer something different at the business. Or, it may advise other shoppers to look no further. While all aspects of a positive review are important, advice, arguably could be the most valuable as this provides social proof to in-market customers. Considering the Advice element helps you to create a quality response to the reviewer.
Ex: “The customer service was incredible! [Experience] I went to return a shirt but couldn’t find my receipt. [Response] Instead of turning me away or only issuing store credit, the manager worked to find the original purchase on the back end and give me a full refund which allowed to me purchase a dress that I’ve been wanting. [Helpfulness] I love this store! If you’ve never been here, you need to go! [Advice]
Why are Responding to Positive Reviews Crucial to Future Sales
The accepted business practice for most companies or business owners has been to prioritize responses for negative reviews. However, this also indicates that you take positive reviews for granted, leading to lower engagement rates by your future brand advocates. Positive reviews are customer testimonials that could mean the difference between closing or losing a potential sale.
Consider this, according to a recent Zendesk study, 95% of customers who had a bad experience said they told someone about it, compared to 87% who shared a good experience. Positive reviews are in short supply. So, responding to these reviewers will encourage repeat behavior and inspire others to share their experiences with your company.
While online reputation is a huge factor for responding to reviews, many businesses don’t take into account how much they are rewarded for responding to them. All major listing sites have algorithms are built to provide the best options, answers, advice, and services. The more reviews you have and the better your star rating, the higher your listing profiles will rank. However, is one metric that is often left out and that is engagement. How often you engage with your customers on your profiles plays a huge benefit for how often your profile is seen. After all, what is the point of having great reviews if no one gets to see them?
How to Respond to Positive Reviews
In general, you should keep track of new reviews of your business. Once you spot positive reviews, take time to respond. Thank the reviewer first for sharing their experience with your company. Show your appreciation and take the time to make it personal. Read the review carefully and reference specific things the reviewer talks about to show you care about your consumers.
This small act of appreciation will push the positive reviewer to talk more about your business to family and friends, which is essentially free promotion. They will also be more willing to review your company again the next time they do business with you.
When it comes to best practices for responding to positive reviews, time is of the essence. Don’t let a positive review sit for weeks or months without responding. Answer soon after as this shows you care about your clients.
Reviews are often posted right after a visit, experience, or purchase from a company. If you do not respond in kind soon after, it looks like you did not care about the customer, as they cared enough to post a good review after their experience.
Responding quickly shows that you are appreciative of the consumer and thankful for their business.
Be sure to share positive reviews on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Potential customers or prospects can read these reviews to make future purchase decisions. Prospective customers will take an active interest in looking at your services or products as a result. This means a potential increase in new business.
Place as much time and effort into your positive reviews as you do the negative and you will see a drastic difference in your traffic flow, both within your retail space and online. Positive reviews have power, so make sure you are harnessing it!
Digital reputation management solutions like Synup offer automated response capabilities that allow you to respond to a review as soon as it is posted. Synup’s intuitive automations help you be more responsive to positive customer feedback. More importantly, Synup’s reputation management suite also enables you to centralize all customer feedback and set up notifications to ensure no review goes unanswered. Your Synup dashboard automatically tags reviews based on keywords like price, experience, service, wait times, and more – surfacing insights that are crucial to your customer experience.
