White-Label Reputation Management: Beyond the Logo
Niladri Sarkar, Synup

Hello, I'm Niladri from Synup. Today we are going to chat about white label setups that most reputation management vendors provide, what we provide, and what customers generally ask for. I've been in this business for almost two decades now. And several businesses, when they first start off, especially agencies, most make the mistake of thinking that's white labeling reputation management product, just a branding question. You put your logo on the report, send review requests from your domain. And you've got a service.

That kind of is the easy part. What decides whether the service works for you or is everything behind the logo? Who handles the reviews every day? What happens when one needs a client to step in when there's an escalation? Do you have a built-in workflow built? Do you have the reporting structures in place? Do you have an escalation matrix in place? If nobody has agreed on that during the sign-up process, the first angry review is probably going to sit there unanswered with multiple people assuming that someone else has got a handle on it.

Start with, if you're starting off now and small, I would recommend that you start with one package that your team can deliver consistently every month. Keep it simple. Here's what I've seen across our partners over the years. Agencies that sell listings and reputation and social together, tend to keep their clients and retain them much longer than agencies and vendors that only ever sold listings package. In listings, you fix the data or do a one-time citation cleanup as we used to do like 15 years ago, and then you go quiet.

Be clear about your response times. And remember to remind your client that there are two clocks. One is how fast you can draft up a reply as soon as a review comes in and respond to it. There are other times how fast you post it depends on how fast your client approves it, especially for one and two-star requests where you need additional information from the client or need an approval. Certain agencies we work with, they work smart in this regard. What they do is they talk to the clients beforehand, understand their brand guidelines, and get them to approve a few templates right at the onset so that they can work with it.

And by templates, I mean templated response for both positive and not so positive or negative reviews. Then you need to understand and present a responsibility matrix during your onboarding plan with a client. There are four parties involved in every review that you see on a platform. Your agency owns delivery. You watch the reviews. You draft the responses. You make sure the right person has approved each one if you have an approval mechanism put into place. And if AI wrote the draft, you are still the one who is going to check it and approve it.

Now, what does the client own? The client owns facts about the business. For example, you cannot know for sure why your technician was late or whether a refund was processed. Only the client can investigate and make that judgment call. The client also owns the business profiles. You get access to them when you sign them up for the work. And when the contract ends, that access goes back to them cleanly. Synup or whatever vendor you decide to use software. We provide you the software. We give you the review sources connected.

We ensure the data is accurate and up-to-date. You reach out to our support team when something breaks. What we don't do is manage service. Our team is not going to write your client's replies or approve them. So that's the fourth is the publisher, the Google of the world, the Facebook, the Yelp, the TripAdvisor. They decide what shows up on their website. You control the response, but you do not actually control if it appears. Google, as an example, can reject responses. It can delete reviews. Then there are the escalation handoffs.

This is where most services tend to break. An escalation is kind of, as an example, is any review your agency cannot respond to on their own. So it has to pass through one or two more people. If a reply needs or requires a fact or decision that is critical in nature, it definitely needs to be your client. Think about refund related questions or a legal threat for that matter you hold the review send it to the client for approval to the person you agreed upon during your onboarding if so I recommend get at least two people or two names from every client before you need them You can even set up a playbook that notifies the backup automatically if the first approver is not available right then and there.

And make sure you read the review, not just the star rating when you're responding to them manually. Because time and again, I've seen that four-star rating, which you might think is positive in nature. They might say something like, great work, but they made me wait a long time. Or all morning, or they missed an appointment. You know, those subtle messages that gets hidden. That's useful information for your customer and your agency should definitely flag such instances of just instead of just saying thanks.

On the left-hand bar, you can find something called the agent. Go to the agent, okay? Access memory. Use this section to set up your brand guidelines. Brand rules. This is where the client's do's and don'ts live. For example, never promise a refund to an agitated client or a happy client. Based on just a review. Never say a problem is fixed until the client confirms it. Always point unhappy customers to contact the business who can actually answer their specific problem instead of the agency doing it.

So write them down here. So you get to decide how much autonomy you're going to give your agent Always keep a human in the loop every draft, make sure that every draft is get reviewed by a person to approve it before it gets posted. For routine positive reviews, I think most clients are happy to give the agency a standing okay. For years, I've seen agencies spending hours on just trying to create reports on a monthly basis. You do not actually need to do that anymore. For example, just when I started this call, I asked Sydekick to give me a reputation performance report from August to October in both PDF and Excel format.

So it created the report PDF format, a professional report along with a CSV download that you can download and send over to your client. What I also like generating, again, this is my personal opinion, is basically a negative sentiment report. So you can ask about a business and see if they have received any negative reviews in the past month. Ask so if you present the negative data to a business then you have action items to work on There are something that the businesses own, the responsibility for the service that you cannot fix on your own.

This is the white label interface that your client sees it has your overview information if your listings the reviews the social the photos the reports that they can view on their own what you send to them needs to be above and beyond what is already available on the dashboard it needs to contain insights. There's the agency logo agency colors You define how the navigation is set up. You define if any custom script needs to go into it. You define what our AI agent is going to be called in front of the client on your dashboard.

Yes. You can actually rename our AI agent Sydekick for your own dashboard. It's white labeled as well. Customers don't get to know that you are using Synup's agent. Now, when you're running, what exactly should you check when in the hunt for a white label reputation management solution software vendor. You should run the same checklist when you're using Synup as well. Can you run the client dashboard on your own domain? Is the setup simple? Are there any vendor names mentioned in the emails or the login page favicon or any of the reports and data that you send out Are the emails that are being sent for review solicitation requests contains your email or does it contain the vendor's email?

The texts that are sent, are they white labeled as well? Make sure that nothing posts without a person approving. There has to be an approval layer. There has to be an escalation layer. There has to be a task manager for you to go back and forth with your team, within your organization, or with the client. When you're exiting the platform, does your data come back to you? What kind of information and data that you can import and keep with you? Ask the questions beforehand rather than waiting for an itemized billing and some surprises at the end of the month I will, we will share the trial checklist along with a very rough draft of a responsibility matrix and example packages that you can create and offer to your customers And thank you again.

Hope you join us again soon. Bye-bye.