Harnessing AI to elevate your e-reputation: how customer reviews can help boost your visibility

Customer reviews have always shaped a local business’s reputation. They can make or break the trust we have in a brand, reassure hesitant customers, and guide consumers’ final choice. But there’s a change in the air; while reviews have always been an important lever, the meteoric rise of generative artificial intelligence has stepped things up a notch. In this article, we’ll examine the role AI plays in boosting an e-reputation and how to harness its power!

E-reputation, the latest local marketing pillar to be rocked by AI

Search engines and conversational assistants no longer just analyse a company’s overall rating: they now dissect and reformulate reviews, and integrate them into their responses.

Nowadays, customers don’t have to read a zillion reviews; they just ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity a question and within seconds get a comprehensive summary of online customer feedback. In other words, your customers are no longer just interacting with other customers: they’re communicating with AI, which in turn will drive their local shopping journey.

Key figure

25% of AI Overviews display snippets of customer reviews in their responses!

25% of AI Overviews display snippets of customer reviews in their responses!

For example, if you ask a Gen-AI search engine where the best hairdresser in Croydon is, it won’t just churn out a list of local salons. It will scour customer reviews for the most relevant data, reformulate it, and then integrate this information into its response. For example, if a review says “a friendly welcome”, AI may display “clients appreciate its friendly welcome”.

AI won’t just count the stars: it will analyse the vocabulary, the adjectives used, and the general tone of the feedback. It will evaluate the emotions expressed by customers and transform them into actionable signals. In other words, you may have tons of generic “great” or “perfect” reviews, but they’ll carry less weight than a detailed comment.

This shifting landscape means reviews are becoming a key source of information for Gen-AI search engines.

Reply quickly with a well-crafted message: every interaction will be transformed into a public signal

Replying to reviews has never been more crucial. It’s always been a way to cement customer relationships, but these days it will directly affect your business’s visibility. AI search engines don’t just analyse what your customers say, they also factor in your replies!

If you don’t reply to a review, consumers will think you’re a passive company or simply don’t care. And to rub salt into the wound, AI will pick up on this lack of communication and be less inclined to include you in search results!

A speedy and personalised response, on the other hand, sends a double signal: it shows your customers that you are attentive and appreciate their feedback AND tells AI search engines that you’re a reactive and proactive company.

Key figure:

63% of consumers say that a company has never responded to them after leaving a review.

63% of consumers say that a company has never responded to them after leaving a review.

Why should you reply to feedback as quickly as possible?

Speed is your friend here. Tardy replies can come across as a lack of care and respect for your customers. If you reply within few hours, you’ll show your customers that you are organised and value your relationship. This type of signal goes a long way in our age of “instant gratification”!

Do you really have to personalise your replies?

A personalised reply is as important as replying quickly. Today’s tech-savvy consumers will immediately notice if a reply is automated, generic, and void of emotion. “Thank you for your feedback” won’t cut it: it won’t win over customers or impress smart GenAI search engines!

A “proper” reply that refers to specifics in a review (the customer’s first name, the product purchased, the date of the visit, or why a product has been returned) has a double benefit: it will strengthen your relationship with the customer who’ll see you’ve paid attention to their feedback and enhance your brand identity: your tone, values, and style will all come across in the conversation.

More than a mere comment: using qualitative analysis as a strategic lever

Replying to reviews is a good start. Fully exploiting this mine of information means going further, by qualitatively analysing customer feedback.

Unlike quantitative analysis, which is limited to average scores or percentages of satisfaction, qualitative analysis  – AKA semantic analysis – dissects the content of reviews to understand exactly what they mean.

A review is more than the number of stars – there’s an entire story. A long wait, a particularly attentive salesperson, an inaccurate product description, an experience that surpassed all expectations… On a broad scale, these signals allow you to detect trends, understand what people like/dislike, and make any necessary changes.

However, this can be extremely time-consuming if you don’t lean on AI. Reading hundreds, if not thousands of reviews and then creating an actionable summary would require the focus of an entire team.

With the help of artificial intelligence, such as Partoo’s Jim, this analysis can be automated through large language models (LLMs) that recognise patterns and identify the feeling expressed. For example, it can detect the tone of the review (positive, neutral or negative), group the reviews by theme (price, welcome, cleanliness, delivery time, etc.), and even spot weaknesses that a human may miss!

AI to take the heat off large-scale review analyses

The rocketing number of customer reviews makes manual management impossible. This is where artificial intelligence tools step up to the mark. They automate processing without sacrificing quality: by generating personalised response suggestions, by automatically translating reviews into the customer’s language, by prioritising returns according to their importance, by automatically tagging each review by theme…

Partoo’s chatbot, Jim, has mastered this approach. It will suggest replies that match your brand’s tone, and allow you to personalise them. It groups reviews by theme to generate actionable summaries and detects the areas of improvement most cited by your customers. Your once time-consuming “chore” will become a valuable marketing lever that will enhance your visibility and keep you one step ahead of the competition.

In a nutshell? Your e-reputation will largely dictate your AI search engine visibility

In our GenAI age, an e-reputation is no longer just about brand image. It determines your visibility and whether search engines will recommend you to internet users. Think of it as customer reviews being the raw material that feeds AI, while your replies shape how AI perceives your product or brand.

Companies that react quickly, provide sincere answers, and handle reviews intelligently will have a considerable advantage. They’ll improve their reputation in the eyes of their customers, as well as the AI search engines that now guide consumer choices.

It’s a no-brainer – if you invest in your e-reputation now, you’ll improve your future visibility.

AI is waiting for you!

Discover Partoo’s latest white paper: “AI for local marketing”, a comprehensive guide to understanding the real impact of AI on : 

• local search, 
• online reputation, 
• and conversational commerce.

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