Responding to online reviews has increasingly become a business’s most important tool for capturing new customers and retaining the ones they have. As an online reputation management company, we at WebPunch are champions of the online review and of responding to those online reviews, both positive and negative. We want to understand how and when businesses are responding.
So, the number-crunching continues: We found that one in three businesses respond to online reviews. Our takeaway? Stand out and respond!
We put our top researchers in our headquartered dungeon with pork rinds, soda, and dreams of freedom as incentives to analyze hundreds of businesses. Our goal is to better understand 1) if the businesses are responding to online reviews and 2) which industries do it more frequently (the researchers may not give us a good review on Glassdoor!).
Have we got some numbers for you! We had our researchers them look at more than 500 businesses in the food and hospitality industries, home cleaning services, travel, healthcare, real estate, and automotive in each region—west, midwest, northeast and southeast. Then they analyzed each business to understand if and when they were responding to online reviews on Google, Yelp and Facebook.
Do businesses respond to reviews and if so, are they responding more to positive or negative reviews? And who does the most stellar job of responding to all of their reviews? We also want to know which industries are more apt to respond to online reviews and which ones tend to let the task go by the wayside.
On average, just over a third of businesses, or 37%, respond to online reviews. And even then, many businesses that do respond only respond to a handful of reviews, some even just one (which we think is a little weird!) What does this mean for you and your business? You can stand out! Be exceptional and respond to your online reviews.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we’ve freed the researchers . . . until further notice.
