Who Answers Your Reviews Over the Holidays?

In most small businesses, review replies are handled by one person, usually the owner, whenever there is a spare moment. That works for most of the year. It stops working in the weeks when there are no spare moments, or when that person takes a week off over Christmas.

Those are also the weeks when more customers come through the door, so more reviews arrive, and when more people read reviews to decide where to shop or who to book. A complaint left unanswered from mid-December to the second week of January sits at the top of your profile for a month, in front of exactly the people you most want to impress.

Name one person, and a backup

Decide now who is responsible for replies from Thanksgiving to New Year's. If that is you, name a backup for the days you are off or tied up. The backup does not need to answer everything. Their job is to make sure nothing sits for more than a day or two, and to pass anything sensitive to you.

Agree how quickly replies should go out. A day or two is a sensible target. Your review reply is written for the next customer, and a fast, calm reply tells that reader someone is paying attention.

Write the guidelines down

A backup who has never answered a review needs a little help. One page is enough, covering the cases that come up most often.

• Positive reviews: thank the person by name, mention something specific from what they wrote, and keep it short.
• Mixed reviews: thank them, acknowledge the part that fell short, and say what you are doing about it.
• Negative reviews: acknowledge the problem in the first sentence, avoid arguing over details, and offer a direct phone number or email to sort it out.
• Anything involving a refund, an injury, a legal threat or a named employee: do not reply, and send it straight to the owner.

Add two or three example replies written in your own voice, so the backup is not starting from a blank box. The review response generator can help with first drafts, as long as each one is edited to fit the actual review. Identical wording under every review reads as automated, and undoes the point of replying at all.

Reviews do not stop for the holidays. The replies should not either.

Set up alerts so nothing is missed

Most people only notice a new review when they happen to open their profile. Turn on notifications for new reviews on Google and on any other site that matters to your business, and send them to whoever is covering, not only to the owner's inbox. If reviews arrive on several sites, one place to watch them all saves a lot of checking.

Use the quiet days after New Year's

The first week of January is usually calmer. Use it to read back through the season's reviews in one sitting. Look for patterns rather than single complaints: the same delay mentioned three times, the same staff member praised again and again. Those patterns are worth more than any individual review, and they tell you what to fix, and what to keep, before next year.

If you would rather not manage it alone, reputation management with Vizible monitors your reviews across the major sites, sends an alert for each new one and lets you respond to all of them in one place. A free growth proposal shows what that would look like for your business.