For a while, you reply to every review yourself. Then you get busy, and the manager starts helping. Then a supervisor at the second location starts replying too. Then one Saturday somebody writes something defensive under a 1-star review and it's public for three days before you see it.

A review response policy is one page of rules that prevents this. It takes half an hour to write and it's the difference between a review page that sounds like one confident business and one that sounds like six different moods.

What the policy needs to cover

Six things. Everything else is optional.

Who replies to what
How fast
The tone and voice
What must never appear in a reply
When to escalate instead of replying
What happens after the reply

The template

Copy this, change the bits in brackets, and put it somewhere your team actually looks.

1. Ownership

4 and 5-star reviews: [role — e.g. shift manager] replies. No approval needed.
3-star reviews: [role] replies. No approval needed.
1 and 2-star reviews: drafted by [role], approved by [owner/manager] before posting.
Reviews naming a staff member, alleging illegality, or mentioning injury, discrimination or health issues: [owner] only. Nobody else replies.

2. Timing

Positive reviews: within [3] working days.
Negative reviews: within [24-48] hours.
Never reply within the first hour after reading a bad review. Draft it, then wait.
Every review gets a reply. No exceptions, no skipping the boring ones.

3. Voice

Sign off with a real first name and role. Never "The Team" on a negative review.
Write the way we speak to customers in person: [warm and casual / professional and calm / friendly but brief].
Positive replies: 1-3 sentences. Negative replies: 3-6 sentences. Never longer than the review itself.
Reference one specific detail from the review in every reply. If you can't, you haven't read it properly.
Never post the same wording twice in a row. Readers scroll.

4. Never, under any circumstances

Never name or identify an employee in a reply, even if the reviewer did.
Never confirm someone is a customer, client or patient in a regulated field. Reply generically and move it offline.
Never dispute the facts publicly. No "actually," no "our records show," no "however."
Never offer refunds, discounts or compensation in a public reply. Move it to email or phone.
Never mention that a review may be fake, even if we're confident it is. Report it privately instead.
Never use the phrase "we're sorry you feel that way."
Never ask a reviewer to change or remove their rating in a public reply, and never offer anything in exchange for a review being changed.
Never post personal contact details of a staff member. Use a business email or number.

5. Escalate immediately, don't reply, if the review

alleges illegal conduct, discrimination, or harassment
mentions injury, illness, or a safety incident
threatens legal action, or comes from a solicitor
demands money in exchange for removal
names a staff member in a way that could identify them
appears to be from a competitor or a former employee
is going viral on social media

In all of these, the person who spots it notifies [owner / named person] the same day. Nobody else touches it.

6. After the reply

Log negative reviews in [where — spreadsheet, shared doc, tool] with the date, the issue, and what we did.
Review the log monthly. Three complaints about the same thing is a process problem, not a customer problem.
When a complaint is resolved privately, go back and update the public reply with one line noting it was resolved.

The two rules that matter most

If your team remembers nothing else from the page, make it these two.

One: never argue in public. Every reply that defends the business loses, regardless of who was right. The audience can't verify the facts but they can absolutely judge the tone.

Two: never identify a person. Not the customer, not the employee. This is the rule that prevents the replies that cause real harm — the ones covered in responding to reviews about a rude employee.

Training the team in twenty minutes

Don't email the policy and hope. Run one short session:

Pull up five real reviews from your own profile — a mix of ratings.
Have everyone draft a reply to each one, on paper, alone, five minutes total.
Read them out. The differences will be obvious and the discussion writes itself.
Agree the best version of each together. Those become your reference examples.

Twenty minutes of this does more than any document, because people remember the conversation about the reply they got wrong.

Multi-location businesses

If you run several sites, add two things. First, decide explicitly whether replies come from head office or from each location — local replies almost always perform better, because they can reference the actual place. Second, keep a shared log across locations so a recurring issue at three sites gets spotted as a systemic problem, not three separate complaints. The wider approach is in multi-location review management.

A note on templates

A policy is not the same as a script. Give your team rules and examples, not five fixed paragraphs to paste — that produces the identical-reply problem that makes profiles look automated. Here's why that backfires.

Reploi enforces most of this policy automatically: consistent voice, specific detail from each review, sensible length, and nothing that names an employee. Your team edits and approves rather than starting from a blank box. Start free — 5 replies/month →

Write a Google Review Response Policy for Your Team (Template)