Sponsored content by Consumer Fusion.

An aspect of online reputation that brands tend to overlook is the importance of responding to positive and negative reviews online. In a recent survey of over 1,000 people, 90% of consumers said they read the responses to negative reviews. The vast majority of the demographic is interested not only in the reviews and ratings themselves, but also in the way a business responds to negative criticism. Likewise, responses to positive feedback increases loyalty to your brand and the likelihood of repeat customers.

One of the main reasons business owners will neglect review responses is time. On average it takes about 3 minutes to write a review response, time that accumulates as more reviews start coming in. This is especially significant for emerging brands with multiple locations to consider. Time spent monitoring online reviews and coming up with appropriate responses is precious time away from the actual day-to-day operations.

Automated Smart Review Responses can be a godsend. Having a tool in place to help automate this task saves you and your team time and money. Imagine what you can do with x amount of hours per week. This technology helped one major brand reply to 2,360 reviews in a single month, amounting to 118 hours saved!

What makes this feature so smart? Using AI-technology, the Smart Review Response feature can intuitively build response templates around your top review sentiment keywords. This allows for the responses to be more specific to the content of each review. Targeting keywords in the responses also gives the added benefit of increased traffic to your online listings, as more and more potential customers use these keywords to search for specific products and services in your local area. AI tools like chatGPT can also help to curate personalized review responses to include in your response templates.

Automated technology also ensures that your reviews are responded to in a timely manner. According to Yelp statistics, responding to a review within 24 hours makes that reviewer 33% more likely to upgrade their review. In other words, responding promptly to reviews can also help to increase your overall star rating. The response time can be set to automatically respond to reviews within 24 hours, and can also be adjusted to your liking. 

As your brand continues to grow, so will the need for an efficient way to respond to positive and negative reviews. Visit Consumer Fusion to download our white paper about this exciting smart technology that is giving major brands an edge over the competition.