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Positive reviews can leave you floating on air, feeling that you have succeeded in your mission as a brand.  But after this initial moment of glory, what comes next? Once you receive positive feedback, it is essential to establish guidelines for responding to positive reviews in order to engage with your customers and represent your brand. 

Step One: Pause and Feel Gratitude

It can be easy to quickly move past even the most moving piece of feedback as soon as the next stressor flies into view. When you receive meaningful feedback for your work, give yourself a simple yet important gift: a moment to pause. Take a moment to consider how the feedback you received fuels your brand mission, vision, and values. How can you cultivate more of this energy in your business? Celebrate this victory and use it to fuel moving forward.

Step Two: Reflect on the Feedback

The next step in managing positive reviews is reflecting on the feedback you’ve received. With negative feedback, there is a sense of urgency and importance because of the detrimental impact it could have on your brand. Unfortunately, responding to positive reviews is often overlooked and glazed over. Counteract this by intentionally taking a closer look. Understand the intricacies of what went right in this particular professional dynamic, so you can incorporate more of these aspects moving forward. The more in-depth understanding you can gain of what is going right in your business, the more effectively you will be able to shape your strategy and tactics.  

Step Three: Engage With Your Happy Clients

In addition to feeling good, positive feedback has the potential to generate future business. Not only will it likely result in the individual who left the review continuing to do business with your brand, but it also has the potential to compound goodwill through word-of-mouth and other methods. Here are a few specific tips for engaging with reviewers:

  • Express gratitude. The person who left you a review invested their time and energy into letting you know how much your service meant to them. Return their energetic investment and show them you truly care about your customers by adding a human touch to your response and allowing them to feel that emotional connection, too.
  • Customize your responses. Use the reviewer’s name in their response, and vary your responses rather than using the same words when responding to positive reviews. By doing these things, you emphasize respect for the reviewer’s humanity and individuality and build a stronger client-brand connection. 
  • Continue the conversation. Receiving positive feedback opens the door to provide additional value. Have a piece of content that might appeal to the customer based on this positive review? Use this moment as a chance to offer them a call to action that benefits them and encourages continued engagement with your brand.

Check out this guide from Hubspot for some additional insight on how to manage reviews, including additional specific tips for responding to positive feedback.

Step Four: Stay Organized!

As noted, it is human nature to be distracted—especially with positive reviews, when there isn’t (seemingly) as much urgency to respond. In order to ensure that positive feedback isn’t put on the back burner and ignored, it is important to establish a plan. 

Start by setting a regular schedule. Setting aside time once a week to respond to positive reviews is ideal. If that isn’t feasible, find time every other week, or at least every month, to start. If you feel that you simply have no time to commit to the task? This is a great task to delegate to another team member. Ultimately, it is worth investing in and has the potential to drive organizational growth.

Another way to get ahead of the game is to craft a list of varied responses to positive feedback. Then if you are crunched for time, you can still keep your verbiage fresh and ensure that customers feel that you care about them as individuals.

Step Five: Celebrate!

Congratulations; you’ve received a positive review, and you have every right to consider that a success! Take a moment to pat yourself on the back and high five your team, and lean into a sigh of relief. Then keep forging forward. 

 

Engagement drives loyalty. If you have the capacity to respond to all reviews, go for it! However, if you don’t have the bandwidth for this, we recommend responding to all 4 and 5-star reviews. And what about the not-so-positive feedback? We’ve got you covered with tools and strategies for managing negative reviews here

May your days be filled with (four and five) stars!

 

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