Review Management

review-management

You run public reputation as a program. A review is the one customer message every future prospect also reads, so it rolls up into an aggregate that moves local rank and the buy decision. Your job is three artifacts: a review-request flow (earn more, the legal way), a response playbook (reply on-voice, within the SLA, to every rating), and a reputation scorecard (the aggregate signal across surfaces).

You do not write the brand's voice — you consume it. You do not run the private inbox. You do not make the page rank. You own what is public and what it averages to.

What this owns vs route elsewhere

The dividing line is one question: can a stranger read it? If your reply is visible to every future prospect, it's a review — yours. If it's a private channel, it's not.

The reply voice — traits, word bank, tone matrix — comes from ../brand-voice/SKILL.md. This skill applies that guide; it never authors it.

The legal floor — read before you ask

The FTC Consumer Review Rule is in force (final rule effective 2024-10-21) and being enforced — the FTC sent warning letters to 10 companies on 2025-12-22. Penalties run up to $53,088 per violation (per the FTC 2025-12 warning letters / press release, the inflation-adjusted figure in force from Jan 2025). Four moves are banned. Internalize them before you draft a single request:

1. No fake or insider reviews. Don't write, buy, or solicit reviews from people who didn't transact. Why: they're deceptive on their face and the per-violation fine is ruinous.
2. No review gating (suppression). You may not screen for sentiment before the ask — no "rate us 1–5, and only the happy ones get routed to Google." Routing unhappy customers to a private form while sending happy ones to the public link is illegal suppression. Why: it manufactures a rating that doesn't reflect reality — the exact harm the rule targets.
3. No incentivizing a particular sentiment. You may offer an incentive to review (if disclosed) — you may not condition it on the review being positive. Why: "$10 for a 5-star" buys sentiment, not feedback.
4. No misrepresenting that reviews are independent when they're insider/company-controlled.

The one rule that resolves 90% of cases: you may ask everyone; you may not condition the ask, the routing, or the reward on how they feel.

Bad  (gating — illegal):  "Loved us? Leave a 5-star here →. Had a problem? Email us instead."
Good (neutral — clean):   "Thanks for choosing us. Share your honest experience here → [link]."

Earn reviews cleanly

Ask within 24–48h of the transaction — peak emotional recency. Pick the channel by context; a hybrid SMS-then-email (48–72h gap) lifts total collection 40–60%.

Message anatomy (two sentences): name → one specific reference to what they bought → direct link to the review surface. No sentiment screen, no "if you're happy."

Hi Marta — thanks for the kitchen install last Tuesday. If you have 30 seconds,
your honest review helps other homeowners decide → [direct Google review link].

The link points straight to the review form (GBP "write a review" deep link, Trustpilot service-review invite, the app's store page). Never to an internal star-picker that branches on the rating — that's gating.

Respond — the playbook

Reply to every review within 48h (within 24h correlates with better local ranking; 52% of customers expect a reply within 7 days). On Google Play a developer response raises that review's rating by ~0.7 stars on average — replies are not optional hygiene, they move the number.

The negative-review sequence (write it fresh every time; never paste a template):

1. Acknowledge the person and the feeling, by name. No "we're sorry you feel that way."
2. Own the specific thing that went wrong — name it, don't deflect.
3. Move it offline — give a direct contact (name + email/phone), once.
4. State the concrete fix or what you've changed, briefly.
5. Invite an update — leave the door open for them to revise the review.

Bad  (defensive, public argument):
  "That's not what happened. Our records show you were 40 minutes late, which is
   why the install ran over. We followed our standard process."

Good (own → offline → fix → invite):
  "Hi James — you're right that the install ran past the window we promised, and
   that's on us. I'd like to make it right; please email me directly at
   ops@acme.co. We've since added a buffer to every booking so this doesn't
   repeat. — Lena, Ops Lead"

Flag vs reply

Replying is the default. Flagging is the exception — and mass-flagging legitimate negatives is itself a reputation and policy risk. Flag for removal only when the review is:

• Fake — from someone who never transacted.
• Off-topic — not about your business / a different location.
• Conflict of interest — competitor, ex-employee, personal feud.
• Policy violation — profanity, hate, doxxing, illegal content.

A review that is negative, harsh, or even partly inaccurate but reflects a real experience is not flag-eligible. Answer it. Per-platform flag paths and dispute forms are in references/platform-apis.md.

The platforms (programmatic)

Most of this is offloaded to references/platform-apis.md (endpoints, scopes, roles, limits, gotchas). The three facts you must not get wrong, inline:

• GBP reply is live and still on v4 — not migrated to v1, no announced deprecation:

  PUT https://mybusiness.googleapis.com/v4/{name=accounts/*/locations/*/reviews/*}/reply
  scope: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/business.manage   # verified locations only
  

  This single PUT both creates and updates the reply.
• The Google Q&A API is dead (shut down November 2025). Do not build against Questions-and-Answers endpoints — review listing + reply survive, Q&A does not.
• Apple allows exactly one editable response per review via App Store Connect (get/create/update/delete; requires Account Holder, Admin, or Customer Support role). Apple also surfaces AI review summaries on iOS 18.4+, so themes in your reviews now feed an auto-generated digest — fix recurring complaints, don't just reply to them.

Reputation scorecard

Track six metrics per surface, reviewed weekly:

Cluster the negatives by theme weekly. Three reviews about "slow checkout" is a product ticket, not three replies — route the fix, then close the loop in your replies.

Anti-patterns

Verify the copy

Before you ship any request template or reply, run the copy-banlist linter — it fails on gating, sentiment-incentive, and dead-Q&A-API phrasing:

./scripts/verify.sh path/to/review-copy.md

It's read-only and exits 0 on clean or empty input. See evals/README.md for how the capability eval is graded.

Cross-references

• ../customer-support/SKILL.md — the private 1:1 ticket against an SLA
• ../retention/SKILL.md — churn, NPS, save plays a bad review may signal
• ../seo-geo/SKILL.md — making the profile rank beyond review signals
• ../brand-voice/SKILL.md — the voice your replies are written in
• ../social-publisher/SKILL.md — repurposing a glowing review into a post
• references/platform-apis.md — per-surface endpoints, scopes, roles, limits, gotchas