Why you should respond to positive customer reviews

Your customer's experience with your brand doesn’t finish once they leave the restaurant or get their nails done. Replying to customer reviews is becoming an increasingly important piece of the customer service picture. Just as you wouldn’t walk away from a customer who has just given you good feedback to your face, you shouldn’t online either. So while you don’t HAVE to reply to every review here’s a few more reasons why you should.

It costs a lot more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.

If your customer has taken the time to write a positive review about your business, it doesn’t take long to acknowledge you care back. If you only address the negative reviews, you appear defensive without showing you’re invested in what your clients have to say. By communicating you value what customers have to say - good or bad - you’re increasing the chance of them becoming loyal lifetime customers.

Your response rate is monitored by ALL major review sites and is rewarded.

Review sites such as Google and Trip Advisor are now monitoring your response rate to reviews, it even has the metric front and centre when you log in to your public profiles. Why do they monitor it? Well for Google, it shows that the page is actively managed. That activity then is rewarded with better online exposure for that listing. With a lot of companies trying to get reviews, this is yet another way you can ensure your business is put in front of potential customers.

Responding to reviews leads to improved sales and revenue.

A new study by Cornell University found that revenue levels increase as the number of review responses increase. This is similar to TripAdvisor who found that responding to more than 50% of reviews correlated with a 7% increase in hotel occupancy. These findings are echoed across other studies and industries and the takeaway is clear.

Customers prefer to go with companies that respond to reviews.

Taking the time to respond to a client’s review is a great way to give something back. Apart from replying to a review with something totally unprofessional, there’s no downside. If you’re worried about the time it takes to monitor new reviews, automate it. Our review system can track your new incoming reviews on nearly any review site and email you when it happens. Then, you only need to take a minute or two to respond back to them. Given that reviews can directly impact your traffic and bottom line it makes sense to do whatever you can to increase the number of reviews.