How to help points of sale respond to customer reviews?

If you have decided to delegate responses to customer reviews to the managers of your points of sale, you must ensure that they respect certain rules in order not to jeopardize your brand's e-reputation.

Define the “tone of voice”

The starting point is to identify what tone managers should use to respond to customer reviews. It often happens that the store manager is in the heat of the action, has a difficult day or is simply annoyed by a negative review. This can sometimes lead to a knee-jerk reaction. You must avoid this reaction being reflected in the response to the review.

By defining the tone that the response should have, and by training your managers on it, you will be able to better control this kind of situation.

Here are some tips:

• Define a general tone and adapt it according to the number of stars given.
• Prepare some examples of best practices.
• Also show examples of what not to do.

Plan to take difficult conversations off the web

For a community manager or someone active in digital marketing, this communication rule is well known. For your point-of-sale managers, this is probably not acquired. Therefore, plan a process that encourages them to continue the conversation offline with a disappointed customer.

In this style, I once had a great experience. After dinner at a restaurant that went terribly wrong (terrible service, dishes served different from the ones ordered, etc.), I left a review on the restaurant's Facebook page. The point of sale manager responded to the review and then directly contacted me by private message to apologize and ask me to give them a second chance. I did and was delighted with this second attempt. Following that, I changed my review.

Offer them standard response templates

Your managers have an advantage over you: they can more easily analyze the reasons for the good/bad reviews left by customers. However, you have more knowledge in managing a community. To help them, you can prepare a set of standard responses that they can draw inspiration from.

Point of attention: consumers are attentive to the fact that the response to a review is personal. Avoid a behavior where the standard response is simply copy-pasted every time.

Plan validation workflows

If you want to go further in controlling these responses, you can also plan a validation before publication by the physical point of sale. There are solutions that will allow you to quickly and easily integrate this kind of workflow.

On the other hand, maybe don't do it for all responses, especially if one of your goals is to reduce your workload. Mainly validate the responses to low ratings (1 star, 2 stars).

Explain to them why it's important

Too often, digital initiatives struggle to penetrate sales outlets. If the initiative is legitimate, it's probably that the stakes are not explained correctly.

Some ideas:

• Develop a short video explaining why it is important to respond to customer reviews. Include the following components: user experience, customer journey and natural referencing.
• Show them numbers to encourage them to be proactive and prove to them that when they implement corrective actions, the results improve.

How can brands implement an optimized customer review management?

Customer reviews have a huge impact on the local web visibility of brands. If they want to generate a maximum number of visits to their store, restaurant or agency through this means, they must take two elements into account:

1. Inform and empower local teams on the brand's digital strategy.
2. Have the right tools at your disposal.

In this logic Mobilosoft is organizing a webinar this month in partnership with Carrefour express which will address the following issue:

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