Multi-Location Review Management: Who Owns the Reply?
Niladri Sarkar, Synup · video transcript (edited video, 10:51)

Hello, I'm Niladri with Synup. We're going to discuss something fairly interesting today. It's about reviews. It's one of those situations that we encountered a few years ago with a very large multi-location client that led to a process change at their end as to how they tackle reviews, especially the not-so-nice ones. And if you are managing a multi-location brand, the escalation matrix, the roles become very important to navigate situations when more than one department needs to be involved in a specific case.

And if marketing, customer service, or both look after your reviews, you also need to agree who's going to handle its response. Otherwise, two people can end up replying to the same review, or both of them assumes that the other is going to take care of it and eventually nobody responds. So when you open a review that is negative in nature or a one-star review, for example, for this specific situation, hypothetical situation, let's deal with a review where a customer has made a fresh complaint that the branch or the location missed an appointment and nobody called them with an update. when you receive a review like this work out which situation you are in first so when you take a step back and analyze the situation, either you can answer with what you already know, or you need certain facts from that specific branch or that location or the location manager first, or it needs to go to someone senior before anybody replies to the review. In this specific case, we do need some facts before responding.

when does a review really need to be escalated? Watch for a mention of either a lawyer or an injury or maybe a safety issue. It could be a discrimination or maybe a specific staff member has been named in a negative review or anything that touches the health or account details of the specific customer. For those, do not draft a response immediately. Instead, set the highest priority, then choose an approver within the organization who can make that call.

So, a few years ago, I used to work with automotive industry and I saw something go wrong with a multi-location automotive group. A review came in for one of the branches regarding a certain coupon or promotion they were running. The branch manager saw it and replied straight away from his Google business profile account without realizing that this social media person was actually in charge of responding to such feedback. So when the social media person saw the same review on the platform that she was using and they were all connected to, she did not see the response from the branch manager. So she went ahead and responded to it as well.

Now, Google does not allow two separate responses to be displayed under the review. so when the customer checked back he or she saw the review that was posted by the social media person later who did not have full context about the situation neither of them did anything wrong They were just working in two different places. So the fix was to get everyone replying from the same interface, where you can see straight away if a review has been responded to or not. So we brought them all on the same platform, created an escalation matrix internally, and made sure such a situation did not arise again. so we define specifically who owns the review who approves them what happens when something goes wrong or if the usual approver or the responder is not available who does it need to get assigned to so before anyone starts writing a response agree who will take care of the response That could be someone in marketing or customer service or it could be somebody in the finance or billing department or in operations.

The important thing is that one person follows it through end to end. even if there are multiple other people that he or she touches upon and who needs to help and contribute. So let me name the role so that it stays clear. I'm creating the task, and in this example, I'll also publish the reply. The assignee owns the response and follows it through.

The location manager has the facts on the ground. And the approver signs off on the wording. So what did we do? We created a task, we chose the assignee, this is the person who is going to coordinate the response and dig up all the information in one place. And I also created a subtask for the local branch manager to dig up more information about this appointment.

It is payment failed or there is an issue with the scheduling software or has there been any communication made with the customer, et cetera, that I need to understand before someone drafts a response and I approve it. So three things that I'm trying to find out in this case? Was the appointment missed? Did anyone contact the customer? What can we do for them now?

And assign it to the location manager. I'm trying to be as specific as possible with what I need because if I just write, please investigate, you may get an update that still doesn't answer the questions that we actually need for a public response to the said review. You can also ask the location to flag anything that they haven't been able to confirm. That's useful to know before you start making promises in your response to the customer. So the location manager adds their answers to the subtask assigned to them.

Need to bring relevant facts into the main task description that way the person reviewing the reply can see what it's based on without having to ask the same questions again. If something is still unknown, leave it as it is. the wording on the response should reflect what you have actually confirmed So for this example, I'll use something like, oh, we saw that we missed your appointment and left you without an update. A customer service team will contact you today to discuss. That works here because we have confirmed the missed appointment and someone has already agreed to contact the customer today.

And if you haven't arranged that follow up, don't include the promise yet. Keep the response focused on the customer's concern and what happens next rather than going into too much detail. There's no need to include the whole investigation or explain how your departments are handling this internally. Once the wording is ready, submit the task for approval. The approver reviews the prepared work in the task itself, including the response.

Now, if such a situation comes back where you encounter a situation when the main approver is not available, like offline, you need somebody else who is authorized to review this type of response. So check internally before you create another task. You can't edit the approver on an existing task. to withdraw the approval request. Then just create the replacement task and carry over the review details, findings, proposed response, and the facts of this case.

and include a reference to the original task. Then let the people involved know which task to use and request approval on the replacement. So, once you have responded to the review, make sure that you check the response was published successfully. so go into the listings directly and check if a specific response is published in google as well because there are times, there have been instances when a response could be blocked for a certain reason or something goes wrong and the response don't get posted for some reason. So make sure you check in both places.

And most importantly, if you have promised a call back to the customer, make sure you do that immediately. Sending a public reply does not finish the customer's issue on its own. You have just done one part of the job. For your team, the habit to building is checking the next person has picked up the work. The task gives everyone somewhere to see the context, but you still need to confirm who is handling the next action.

That's very crucial. So if you're running this across a lot of branches and locations, agree who owns the reviews and who your backup approvers are. along with your escalation matrix within the organization, because you will find it useful when the need arises. Thank you again for tuning in. Have a nice day.

Bye.