Navigating online reviews is crucial for your community’s reputation and success. Your online reviews are often the first thing prospects and families read when searching for your community online. These reviews aren’t just nice words though – they’re the breadcrumbs that Google devours and uses to influence your community’s ranking in key search results such as google map listings and organic search.
BrightLocal’s local consumer survey shows that 49% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family members. In senior living, trust is a key factor to engage with prospects and families. Ensuring the validity of your online reviews can increase leads and result in more tours and move-ins for your community.
We can’t ignore the fact that online reviews can be the secret sauce to help your community stand out. Don’t just take our word for it—dive into our blog on The Value of Reviews and discover how these gems can make your community shine brighter than a diamond.
Let’s review best practices, processes and tools so you can craft a custom review strategy to showcase your exceptional community, team and services.
In this article, we’ll review the following:
Why You Should Respond to Online Reviews
When a negative review comes in, it can be tempting to ignore it or rationalize that it doesn’t deserve your time to respond. This approach almost never works and can even be more harmful than good.
Building trust and brand credibility online not only leads to increased leads but also to improved occupancy for your community.
Crafting a thoughtful strategy to engage with all reviews, whether they sing your praises or present challenges, isn’t just savvy—it’s essential. Here’s a few reasons why:
Show prospects and families that you are listening.
Responding to negative feedback shows your audience that you are listening and taking reviews seriously. Not only responding but letting your readers know what action or follow-up items will be taken is a good way to build trust and connection with the person who left the review and with others reading the comments.
Increase your community ranking in search results.
When it comes to online visibility and ranking on search engines, engagement metrics play a crucial role. Search engines like Google take into account various factors to determine the relevance and authority of a website or page, and one significant factor is user engagement.
User engagement encompasses a range of interactions users have with your online content, including reviews and responses to those reviews. By actively responding to all reviews, including the negative ones, you demonstrate to both potential customers and search engines that you are actively involved in managing your online presence and addressing customer feedback.
Change the perception and shift the narrative.
Each negative review is a chance to shift the narrative and acknowledge the reviewer’s concerns, worries or experiences. It’s also an opportunity to provide a solution or action that is being done to address the corners at hand.
Best Practices and Process for Managing Negative Online Reviews
Responding to negative reviews online requires tact, empathy, and professionalism. Here are some best practices:
- Stay Calm and Objective: Emotions can run high when dealing with criticism, but it’s crucial to remain composed and approach the situation clearly.
- Acknowledge the Issue Promptly: Respond to the review in a timely manner to show that you take feedback seriously. If there’s a solution or follow-up to the issue at hand, let the individual know what actions will be taken to follow up.
- Express Empathy: Caring for a loved one or yourself is an important process and commitment. Put yourself in the person’s shoes and respond with empathy and compassion.
- Take the Conversation Offline: Having an offline channel to direct the conversation can be beneficial. Setting up an email distribution that reaches leadership can be a good way to funnel the conversation offline yet still ensuring that the individual has an outlet to voice concern that will reach leadership in the community.
- Maintain Professionalism: Avoid getting defensive or engaging in arguments. Keep your responses polite, professional, and focused on resolving the customer’s concerns.
Follow Up: After addressing the issue, follow up with the individual [offline] to ensure their concerns have been adequately resolved and to thank them for their feedback.
Tools to Manage and Monitor Online Reviews
Monitoring online reviews across multiple platforms can be challenging for most senior living marketers. However, several sophisticated platforms are designed exclusively for this purpose.
These tools can automate surveying various online channels for new reviews. By leveraging the capabilities of these platforms, you can automate a process to monitor and respond promptly to your online reviewers.
Many platforms also offer the ability to set up templates when responding to reviews depending on the subject matter addressed in the review. With some customization, users can easily select a template that follows the community’s brand voice and best practices to respond to each review quickly.
Let’s review which platform could help your team set up an effective strategy for monitoring and responding to online reviews.
Reputation – Reputation.com is a platform designed to help businesses manage and improve their online reputation. It offers tools and services for monitoring online reviews, social media mentions, and other forms of online feedback. The platform also provides analytics and insights to help businesses understand their online reputation and take action to improve it.
Opiniion – Opiniion.com is a platform specializing in reputation management for senior living communities. It offers solutions tailored to the needs of these industries, including tools for collecting and managing resident feedback, monitoring online reviews, and improving the overall resident experience. Opiniion.com enables users to gather real-time insights, address issues promptly, and enhance their online reputation.
Birdeye – BirdEye is a comprehensive customer experience platform that helps businesses manage their online reputation, collect and analyze customer feedback, and improve their overall customer experience. It offers features such as online review management, customer surveys, social media monitoring, and competitive benchmarking to help businesses understand and enhance their online presence and reputation.
Resources to Make Your Online Reputation Shine
Now that you understand the why, how and what of responding to online reviews, we’d like to provide you with resources that will help you elevate your community’s online reputation.
Download your copy of Navigating Feedback: SGD’s Online Review Response Playbook. In this guide, you’ll find a library of response templates to use when responding to online reviews.
If you are looking to increase the number of reviews for your community, Our Free E-Book: Executive Guide to finding more Raving Fans for Senior Living Leaders is a great resource for learning how to generate more reviews.
Not sure where to go from here? Schedule a digital discovery call with the Smart Girl team to review strategies for ensuring your company has the right process, tools and insight to make your company brand shine online.