What is Review management?
Review management consists of three recurring tasks: asking, replying, reporting. It is not a tool you buy but a routine of roughly twenty minutes a week, and it belongs to whoever holds the customer contact anyway. The review column of your profile is the most widely read text about your business - leave it unassigned and it belongs to whoever happens to be angry.
The ask works best when it sits firmly at the end of the process: one sentence at handover, a QR code on the invoice, the review link in the closing message. It goes to every customer alike, with the same wording, and it asks for an honest verdict rather than five stars. For the automated email ask there is a hard legal line: it counts as advertising and needs prior, documented consent.
The reply is the part entirely in your own hands - and it is addressed not to the person who wrote the review but to the next person reading along. Every review gets a short, individual reply with one detail from the case, the critical ones first. Recognisably fake or misattributed reviews are reported through the platform's tools rather than argued with in public. What does not belong: incentives, bought reviews and pre-filtering by satisfaction.
Why does Review management matter?
In BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey, 83 per cent of those asked for a review go on to write one, and 80 per cent are more likely to use a business that replies to every review - US figures, but the direction is unambiguous: the two most effective parts of review management cost nothing but routine.
Review management in practice
- 01A trades business puts the QR code for its review link on the final invoice and makes the ask a fixed sentence at handover.
- 02A studio replies to every review within three days with one detail from the actual visit - critical ones first, no templates.
- 03A review clearly belongs to a different company: the business reports it through the Business Profile instead of contradicting it publicly.
