Over the past five years, I have worked with hundreds of local businesses and multi-location brands to help them manage their online reputation using our tool. In the process, we have seen many strategies that, when properly implemented, can have a significant impact on store sales.

I’m, of course, referring to how restaurants, car dealerships, hospitals, and gyms can use a hidden weapon called online reviews. It really comes down to three things:

1. Learning from online reviews to improve operations.
2. Responding to all reviews in a consistent manner.
3. Naturally generating positive reviews, but with a little help.

Let me dive into each strategy one by one.

Review Analysis

Before diving in, I should start by saying that to extract actionable insights from online reviews, you need a large enough dataset to make it reliable. For example, if you have just one restaurant location and receive only a few reviews weekly, this won’t work well. However, if you have more than ten locations for the same food concept, you’ll have enough data to be statistically significant.

It’s also worth noting that you should have access to all your review sources from across the web to get a full picture of what each customer segment is telling you. Yes, Google may sometimes be the dominant source of your online reviews, but if you have decent delivery orders, you should also look at reviews coming from delivery or pickup apps like Deliveroo, UberEats, and Zomato. Moreover, in some countries like Canada, you also have local review sites used frequently by locals (for example, the popular RestoMonreal in Quebec).

Another prerequisite is having an easy way to collect these reviews — preferably through an automation tool like Localyser, but it can also be done manually (lots of copy-pasting). This is important because you need a searchable database to dive deeper into some keywords (for example, “service” or the name of a dish) in addition to good visual reports to track KPIs like average star rating over a time range such as the past 30 days, breakdown of positive vs. negative reviews, and a chart showing the source of the reviews (their origin on the web).

Now that you’ve set all this up, what I recommend is integrating insights from online reviews into your weekly or monthly operations meetings. I’ve been invited to many of these and found that having access to online review reports during these meetings can be extremely helpful. This is because most operations managers cannot access reliable customer feedback data and instead rely on anecdotes and past experiences that can lead to wrong positive decisions.

Here are the areas I look at during these operations meetings:
• Does the star rating increase or decrease month-over-month (MoM) across all locations broken down by source (e.g., Google, Zomato)?
• How does the number of reviews change monthly and what is the percentage of negative reviews?
• How do the response rate and response time change monthly across all locations (this should be at least 75% response rate with a maximum 2-day response time)?

Localyser’s ranking report breaks down all these KPIs and automatically calculates the MoM changes for each location (see below our ranking report).

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You’ll quickly see two standout data points — the best-performing locations and the lowest-performing stores. The former helps you identify what your best stores are doing right so you can learn from it and apply it across all locations. The latter requires deeper analysis to understand why they are struggling compared to the rest of your portfolio. Then go ahead and start reading the negative reviews for those low-performing locations. You will quickly find trends in the review comments and identify at least one area that can be fixed quickly and assign someone to take care of it.

For the lucky brands that have lots of review data, reading them one by one can be time-consuming. You can leverage some Excel tools to do word counts to identify the most frequently occurring words in reviews. For our clients, we recently provided an Insights report (see below) that uses machine learning and natural language processing to automatically classify reviews into predefined categories. For restaurant operators as an example, the categories are split as follows:
• Food-related (taste, quality, quantity)
• Service-related (speed, friendliness)
• Delivery-related (speed, accuracy, packaging)
• Atmosphere-related
• Price/value-related

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Responding to Reviews

It goes without saying that responding to reviews not only helps win back unhappy customers but also converts future customers who read those negative reviews online. In fact, according to a recent study by Qualtrics, 82% of buyers are influenced by how a brand responds to reviews.

But how do you ensure your team can respond to 100% of reviews in a timely manner without breaking the bank? The answer is automation! Otherwise, start by focusing on the most important review source like Google and slowly expand from there.

However, the following pieces must be in place to achieve these high KPI levels:

1. First and foremost, ensure your team has access to all your listing accounts on Google, Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.
2. For Google, you will need to claim and verify your listing before you can respond to comments. The others have an easier ownership verification process.
3. Prepare well-crafted response templates.
4. Decide who will manage the responses — this can be centralized at headquarters or decentralized at the store level.

Once everything is set and the team is ready to go, I recommend making this task part of their job role and setting performance goals like a minimum response rate and maximum response time. If you are just starting, begin with an achievable goal like a 50% response rate with a 3 business day response time. Once the team reaches this goal, celebrate this KPI and increase it to 75% and then 100% with an ideal one-day response time.

This can definitely be done manually at first by logging in and out of each review site platform, but you will soon find that as you grow in sales and number of locations, you will need to automate this process using a reliable online reputation management tool.

Generating Positive Reviews

I saved the most important point for last, but I cannot stress enough how crucial the first two points above are — without them, generating reviews will not be as impactful. It’s kind of like sweeping dirt under the rug or not addressing the root cause of the problem.

Generating more positive reviews can be a good short-term tactic to boost your star rating, but Google relies on other signals to rank the map listings in search requests; such as keywords, proximity, response rate, time (brand interaction with customers), among other things.

I would also add that generating more positive reviews should come organically and consistently, not as an occasional promotional campaign. It’s also better to make it easy for your customers to leave a review rather than putting the onus immediately on your staff to ask customers directly, like, “Hi, can you leave us a review?” This puts unwanted pressure on both your staff and customers; your staff will immediately be biased to ask only happy customers for feedback, and customers will feel uncomfortable leaving a review and may want something in return like an incentive (a big no-no that I will cover in a later post).

The solution is to provide your team with a feedback tool that suggests the customer share their feedback online. This process will not only make it easier for both parties by digitizing the user experience (think of a QR code linking to a short survey) but also removes the pressure to leave a review immediately. Asking for feedback (link to blog post on reviews) is much easier, and most customers are happier to provide it.

Conclusion

I have seen hundreds of our clients follow the above three-pronged strategy and witness amazing results. It’s like a snowball effect: the more you learn from current reviews to fix operational issues, the happier your customers; the more you respond to feedback, the more you win back and retain customers; and the more reviews you have, the higher your Google and other review site ratings.

This makes your online presence more discoverable and leads to increased traffic to your store and website, boosting your orders and sales eventually in the form of table reservations, in-store visits, takeouts, and more.

And that’s how you leverage online reviews to increase your store sales.

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