How to Master Multi-Location Reputation Management

Multi-location brands face a unique challenge where they have to worry about their global, national, and local reputations. That’s why it’s essential to have a multi-location reputation management system in place.

At SOCi, we’ve served over 800 multi-location brands, with over three million locations. We know what it takes to improve and uphold your enterprise’s multi-location reputation.

In this blog, we’ll explain how to manage your multi-location reputation by:

• Monitoring and responding to online reviews
• Deploying surveys to capture customer feedback and sentiment
• Analyzing survey and review responses 
• Implementing changes and measuring their effectiveness

Let’s get started!

How to Monitor Reviews Across Multiple Platforms and Locations

Ratings and reviews are among the most important influencers of your brand’s reputation. They heavily impact how consumers perceive your business.

• Ninety-eight percent of consumers feel that reviews are an essential resource when making a purchase decision.

• Nearly 8 in 10 consumers “regularly” or “always” read online reviews of local businesses.

• On Google, conversions improve by 44 percent when a business increases its average star rating by one full star. 

The data speaks for itself — consumers care about reviews. Multi-location businesses encounter the distinct challenge of monitoring ratings and reviews across 100s or 1,000s of locations and multiple platforms and directories, such as Google, Facebook, and Yelp.

Therefore, you need a strategy in place to monitor these reviews. Multi-location businesses typically institute one of these three scenarios:

Regardless of your business’s chosen model, you must know who is responsible for responding to reviews — which we’ll get into in the next section.

Respond to Reviews

More than three-quarters of consumers who leave a critical review expect a response from a business. Moreover, 40 percent expect a response within 24 hours of posting the review.

Despite the demand from consumers for businesses to respond to reviews, our 2023 Local Visibility Index (LVI) found that the average multi-location business only responds to 35 percent of negative reviews.

Now is the opportune moment for your multi-location company to get ahead of competitors by beginning to respond to reviews daily. 

To make the most significant impact on your multi-location reputation, follow these review response guidelines:

• Prioritize responding to your stores’ most recent reviews — particularly negative ones
• Don’t respond to ratings (text-free reviews) since there’s no context behind the rating to comment on
• Ensure all responses are professional but personalized so they don’t seem robotic
• Take sensitive or delicate conversations offline

Responding to reviews shows current and future customers that you care about their opinions and feedback. This improves your online reputation and encourages other clients to leave feedback. 

For more details on how to best respond to reviews to heighten your online reputation, download The Multi-Location Marketer’s Guide to Online Reputation Management.

Deploy Surveys to Better Manage Your Reputation

Generally, reviews often capture the outer ends of your customer base — those extremely satisfied or dissatisfied with your company’s products or services. 

Thus, to better gain insight from the bulk of your customers — often called the silent majority — we recommend deploying customer surveys. Surveys help you protect your reputation by proactively capturing the thoughts and sentiments of patrons at your stores. 

Surveys also help you identify and address pain points in your customer journey, allowing you to improve your customer experience (CX). Brands that provide a solid CX generate 5.7x more revenue than competitors who fall short.

Surveys also allow you to proactively enact changes and make updates, which reduces negative reviews and boosts your online reputation. 

If your multi-location brand is just getting started with surveys, our guide, Survey Secrets: The Multi-Location Marketer’s Guide to Boosting Customer Experience and Online Reputation, can help!

Track and Analyze Your Survey and Review Data

As noted earlier, receiving reviews and survey responses is crucial, but analyzing them is equally important. 

When analyzing reviews and survey responses, you must:

Categorize feedback into themes: Group feedback into common categories, such as product quality, customer service, or pricing.

Utilize sentiment analysis: Use sentiment analysis tools to gauge the overall sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative) for each category.

Identify trends: Ratings and quantitative survey responses give you numerical data to work with. Cross-reference your numerical and sentiment analysis data within each theme to gain insights into customer preferences and critical pain points.

Compare individual business locations: If some stores perform better than others in different themes, dig into your data to understand why. See if there are patterns amongst your high and low-performing stores.

Analyzing and understanding the data from your online reviews and survey responses will help you manage and improve your multi-location reputation.

Enact Changes and Continue Measuring

You’ve collected reviews and surveys and have analyzed the data. Now, it’s time to make modifications to your local businesses.

First, prioritize your updates. Consider going after high-impact areas to start or taking on easy-to-fix issues. 

Remember, as a multi-location enterprise, you want to ensure a consistent CX at each location. If several locations fall short of meeting your company’s CX expectations, retrain the staff. If all your locations face CX issues, update your standard operating procedures (SOPs) and retrain local teams. 

Once you’ve implemented these changes, you can address recent reviews complaining about prior issues, letting the reviewer and other consumers know about your updates. You can also acknowledge customer feedback and prior pain points in your marketing campaigns. Don’t be afraid to overtly state your recent updates and acknowledge that previous issues no longer exist.

Lastly, continue delivering surveys and analyzing reviews to ensure your updates are having the desired impact on your local businesses.

Select the Right Multi-Location Reputation Management Software 

Managing a multi-location reputation management strategy is challenging. Finding software to manage and scale your software is essential. To help, consider using SOCi.

SOCi is the CoMarketing Cloud for multi-location enterprises. Our best-in-class tools can help you have the best-in-class reputation!

For instance, SOCi Genius Reviews combines our award-winning review response and management software with GPT-4 to automatically aggregate and respond to your reviews across all locations.

SOCi Genius Reviews helps you increase revenue by reducing the impact of unmanaged customer reviews. It also has sentiment analysis abilities to assist you in identifying and tracking how customers perceive your businesses, helping you boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

For surveys, we launched SOCi Surveys, which allows you to send tailored surveys and collect feedback across your locations. You can deploy these surveys online, via email, and soon by SMS.

These surveys also have sentiment analysis capabilities, giving you access to first-party data, which you have complete control over. With SOCi Surveys, you can reduce negative reviews, better understand your customers, and boost your online reputation.

Request a demo today to learn how SOCi can improve your multi-location reputation management and marketing strategy.