Review Reputation

# Review and Reputation

Know what customers are saying, answer it in the owner's voice, and notice the ones quietly walking away.

Two jobs live here and they share the same evidence. The public one is reviews and ratings — visible, permanent, and read by everyone deciding whether to call. The private one is churn: the customer who has not ordered in seven months and has not complained about anything, because people rarely announce that they are leaving.

## Step 1 — Set the window and gather everything

Default to the last 90 days. Reviews move slowly, and a 30-day window on a business with six reviews a quarter produces a report with nothing in it.

Read `reference/sources.md` for the query detail and the fallbacks. Pull in one pass:

- **Public reviews** — Google, Yelp, Facebook, and industry sites. Fetch what is visible on the web when no connector reads them, and accept a pasted or exported file whenever the owner has one. Exports are the better source: they carry dates and ratings the page may not. - **Disputes and tickets** — disputes from the payments connector (PayPal, Square, or Stripe), tickets and feedback from the CRM, and tickets from a support desk (Zoho Desk). A CRM, a payments connector, or a storefront (Shopify or Square — order history is who bought what and when) is the required backbone; the desk deepens it. - **Email** — threads carrying complaint or praise language. - **Shopify orders** — fulfillment and refund patterns, covered in Step 3.

If a source rate-limits or returns nothing, record it by name in the Sources section and continue. A named gap is information. A silent gap looks like good news and is not.

## Step 2 — Extract themes with the customer's own words

Group the evidence into three to five recurring themes. Each theme carries a one-line label, a signal count, and two or three verbatim quotes tagged to their source.

Quote verbatim, always. Paraphrase is where this report loses its credibility — the owner needs to see what the customer actually wrote, not a summary of the mood. "Ordered two weeks ago and still nothing" lands. "Customers expressed shipping concerns" does not.

Rank by signal count, not by how loud any single complaint was.

## Step 3 — Read the order data as sentiment

With Shopify connected, behavior often says more than words. Read `reference/churn-signals.md` for thresholds.

Late fulfillment, partial shipments, and repeat refunds against the same product or the same time window usually show up in reviews a few weeks later. Finding the pattern in the orders first is the only chance the owner gets to fix it before it becomes public.

Report what the data shows, never what it implies about a number you do not have. If refund reasons are not recorded, say they are unavailable rather than guessing at causes.

## Step 4 — Draft a response to every review

Read [the shared voice profile](../../shared/voice-profile.md). Every skill writing in the owner's name reads the same file, so a correction made once holds everywhere. Without a profile, build one from their own writing and confirm it — a public review response in a guessed voice is embarrassing in a way a draft email is not.

Answer every review, not only the bad ones. Read `reference/response-patterns.md` for the shape of each.

- **Negative** — name the specific thing that went wrong, say what has changed, and move the rest offline with a real contact route. No defending, no explaining the policy, no "we're sorry you feel that way." - **Positive** — short, specific, and human. Thank them for the actual thing they mentioned. - **Mixed** — acknowledge both halves honestly. A review that says the work was great and the scheduling was a mess deserves an answer to both. - **Unfair or false** — stay calm, correct the factual point once, and stop. Read the escalation path in the reference before requesting a removal.

Under 60 words for public responses. Anyone reading a paragraph-long reply assumes the business is arguing.

**Approval gate.** Nothing posts publicly without the owner reading it first. Present every draft together with the review it answers, and post only what the owner approves, one by one.

## Step 5 — Find the customers who went quiet

A quiet customer is one whose gap since their last order or job has stretched well past their own normal rhythm — not past some industry average. Someone who buys quarterly and has been gone seven months is a churn signal. Someone who buys annually is not.

Read `reference/churn-signals.md` for how to set the rhythm per customer and which ones are worth chasing. Rank by what the relationship was worth, not by how long the silence has been. Fifteen names the owner will actually work beats a list of two hundred.

Flag anyone who left a negative review and then stopped ordering. That pairing is the clearest churn signal in the data and the one most worth a personal call.

## Step 6 — Draft win-back offers worth sending

One message per customer, referencing s