Replying to reviews: a job that never stops
Your customers expect a reply, and fast: 89% of consumers expect business owners to respond to reviews, nearly one in five on the same day, and 81% within a week1. They want it personal: a generic or templated reply puts off half of them1.
Keeping up that pace by hand, review after review, is hard for an independent business. Handing it to an agency means a monthly fee, for a task that comes back every day, weekends included.
What generative AI changes
1. A cost you know in advance
Software like ReplyTop replies to your reviews for a fixed monthly subscription, with no commitment, and a free plan to get started on Google.
2. Replies even at the weekend
AI does not take days off. ReplyTop checks your Google reviews three times a day and replies straight away: a review left on Sunday evening has its reply the next morning. A critical review is drafted immediately but waits for your approval.
3. A reply specific to each review
A language model reads the review before replying to it. ReplyTop picks up a detail from what the customer wrote and varies its wording from one reply to the next. That is exactly what BrightLocal recommends: use AI to go faster, as long as every reply stays genuine and tailored to the feedback1. The experts have adopted it too: Darren Shaw, who runs the benchmark local SEO survey, has AI draft his review replies and reviews them before publishing2.
Does the agency still have a role?
Yes, for strategy: getting more reviews, looking after your profile, your website and your local presence. Writing the replies is the most repetitive task. That is where automation saves the most time, and it frees the agency for the work that really needs its expertise.