Over Half Of Consumers Won’t Use Businesses That Ignore Their Reviews, Survey Finds

Does your company respond to its online reviews, or offer this service to its clients? If the answer is no, you’re losing huge amounts of potential business.

A comprehensive new survey from BrightLocal, which collected data from over 1,100 participants, reveals that more than half of consumers — about 57% — are “’not very’ or ‘not at all’ likely to use a business that doesn’t respond to reviews.” But on the other hand, there was also good news: almost nine out of 10 consumers said they were “’highly’ or ‘fairly’ likely to use a business that responds to all of its online reviews.”

Responding to ratings and reviews is no longer an optional courtesy: it’s an essential part of gaining customers and growing your business. Through our response scribe service, Shout About Us provides your agency with the tools to ensure that your clients’ reviews receive prompt, personalized, on-brand replies in 24 hours or less — guaranteed. Continue reading to learn more about our review reply service and how it can help you grow your agency or brand, along with some practical tips for responding to positive (and not-so-positive) comments from reviewers. Be sure to follow our blog and check back later this month, when our response scribes will be taking a deeper dive into some more statistics from BrightLocal’s latest report.

The Results Are In: 89% of Shoppers Are More Likely to Use Businesses That Reply to Reviews  

BrightLocal releases a detailed annual survey about trends and attitudes around online reviews, providing marketing agencies and other types of businesses with actionable insights into how they can better serve (and appeal to) consumers via a tailored review response strategy. For example, a past survey revealed that 20% of consumers expected to receive responses to their reviews within 24 hours, giving businesses clearer ideas about how fast they should be responding.

The newest edition of the survey, which was conducted in November and released last month, covers a range of important statistics that we’ll explore in a separate post later this February. But for now, we want to emphasize four crucial, related findings from the report:

1. “89% of consumers would be ‘likely’ or ‘highly likely’ to use businesses that respond to all reviews”
2. “59% of users said they are fairly likely to use a business that responds to all reviews”
3. “52% said they would use a business if a merchant responded to only negative reviews”
4. “22% say they’re ‘not likely at all’ to use businesses that don’t respond to any reviews”

If you aren’t in the practice of responding to reviews, you may be losing out on a fifth (or more) of your potential customers. Fortunately, as the data also shows, the more reviews you respond to, the likelier shoppers are to trust your brand and give your business a chance.  

The report also made another salient point: “consumers feel more favorably about review profiles including responses to negative reviews, rather than those with replies to positive reviews only.” While thanking customers for positive feedback is a great way to get the ball rolling, your review management strategy should also include a detailed plan for dealing with negative comments.

For more tips on handling bad reviews, scroll down to the section on how to respond to feedback from customers. Or, continue reading to learn how else your brand or agency can benefit by offering your clients a review reply service with support from Shout About Us and our team of response scribes.

How Else Can Your Agency or Brand Benefit from Using or Offering a Review Response Service?

The statistics above provide compelling reasons to consider offering (or utilizing) a review management service. But there are also additional ways that your brand or agency can reap the benefits. If you want to establish your reputation as an agency that achieves results for its clients, here are three more advantages of working with our response scribes:

1. Help your clients (and your own team) save time. Time is a resource that businesses never have enough of — but our response scribe service can help you save up to 96 hours of in-house work per month. That’s like freeing up 12 eight-hour workdays that could be better spent on priority projects.
2. Help your clients generate revenue. One client generated $143,000 of new revenue within the first six months of adding our response scribe service.
3. Help your clients score higher star ratings. Businesses that use our response scribe service experience an average rating increase from 3.9 stars to 4.6 stars, which sends powerful signals to consumers (and search engines).

The better your agency is able to meet the growing need for online review management, the more your business will be able to grow and thrive — but not if there are any serious flaws in your review response strategy. To ensure that you deal with reviews effectively, whether on behalf of a client or your own business, here are some tips on the “do’s” and “don’ts” of replying to online reviews.

Tips for Responding to Online Reviews More Effectively

Having a review management strategy in place will help your agency or brand address positive, negative, or even neutral ratings with the promptness and professionalism your clients (and their customers) expect. Explore the articles below for detailed tips on what to do — and just as importantly, what not to do — when replying to reviews on platforms like Yelp and Facebook.

• – 3 review management mistakes your agency or brand needs to stop making
• – Responding to negative business reviews
• – Responding to positive reviews of your business
• – Tips on responding to old reviews
• – Tips for dealing with fake reviews

If that seems like more work than you have time for, don’t worry: we’ve got your agency or brand covered with our response scribe service, which ensures that every review receives a personalized response within one day. Your team has the option to review and edit responses to all reviews, all negative reviews, and/or potentially sensitive reviews, such as reviews that involve discrimination or safety. Whether you prefer to take a hands-off approach or play a more direct role in the response process, you set your level of preferred involvement — we cater our service to your company’s needs. With our response scribes and customer support team providing 24-hour assistance, you’ll never have to ignore another review again — or lose a potential customer over the failure to respond.

Learn more about why your agency or brand needs a reputation management vendor.

Schedule a Demo of Our Review Response Service for Digital Marketing Agencies and Brands

Review platforms like Yelp, Facebook, and Google Business Profiles aren’t going away anytime soon. On the contrary, reviews are gaining more influence over consumer behavior, with 77% of consumers “’always’ or ‘regularly’ read[ing] them when browsing for local businesses (up from 60% in 2020),” according to BrightLocal. If you’re a digital marketing agency, offering a custom review response service is an effective, cost-efficient way to provide value to your clients while distinguishing yourself from your competitors.

Look to Shout About Us to provide comprehensive reputation management solutions, including online review management, review generation, and custom review response. With our team supporting yours, you can help your clients build trust, convert and retain customers, and better meet the evolving expectations and needs of modern consumers.

Discover why V Digital Services, Qebot, CallSource, Curious Jane, and other digital agencies trust Shout About Us to manage reviews on behalf of their clients. Book a demo for your agency or brand today to learn more.

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