A company I worked for was using one of the most well-known online reputation management companies to monitor online reviews and to respond to them. That company eventually lost its business relationship with Yelp, so Yelp reviews no longer showed in its online dashboard.
Before that loss, Yelp reviews were one of the most common reviews to work with in that online review platform. It no longer made sense to keep using a reputation management platform that didn’t show them.
My employer was paying about $18,000 a year for the reputation management platform. It had an online review dashboard, some review reports, and generic responses to reviews so you didn’t have to write each response manually. You could also submit bulk review requests by email, which actually tends to no longer be effective because the emails are typically seen as impersonal and many people already get a lot of email. It also might have been the bulk email review requests that caused Yelp to stop working with the reputation management company because asking for reviews by the dozens or hundreds may have been perceived as review manipulation.
So, what do you do?
The first option is to ask if it is truly necessary to pay all that money every year to mostly monitor Google and Yelp reviews. This particular company had about 60 stores and hundreds of online reviews. So it might seem the answer was ‘yes’. However, there were only about three to five new reviews per day coming in and sometimes there were only one to two. Rather than paying $18,000 a year, an employee could have created a spreadsheet with review rating, location and date and simply copied and pasted each one into it. With such a small number of new daily reviews, an employee could have responded to each one within Google Business Pages or Yelp.
Let’s review something quickly, $18,000 a year for five years is $90,000. That’s a lot of money to spend on an online review platform that wasn’t necessary.
Online dashboards might seem ‘cool’ or ‘sexy’ and they are visually appealing sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that they solve every problem or that they are even beneficial.
In the case of the particular reputation management company and my former employer spending all that money was mostly a waste.
If you make unfounded assumptions about technology always being a solution you might overspend or waste a great deal of money.
In some cases, a low-tech solution that doesn’t cost much at all would work just as well and not waste tens of thousands of dollars or more.