Every agency that looks after local clients ends up in the same place. Five businesses, five Google accounts, and a browser profile situation that nobody would design on purpose.
The replying is not the hard part. Writing three sentences to an unhappy customer takes two minutes. The hard part is the twenty minutes around it: finding the right account, signing in, scrolling to see what is new, signing out, doing it again.
Stop collecting passwords
I have watched agencies keep a spreadsheet of client Google logins. It is understandable and it is a bad idea.
It breaks the first time a client turns on two factor authentication, which they should. It makes you responsible for credentials you have no business holding. And if anything goes wrong on that account, the shared password means nobody can tell who did what.
The alternative takes one email. Ask the client to add you as a manager on their Google Business Profile. They keep ownership, you get the access you need to reply and edit, and removing you later is one click for them rather than a password change and a phone call.
If a client refuses, that is usually a sign they do not understand what they are being asked. Explain that a manager cannot delete the listing or remove the owner. That normally settles it.
One inbox instead of five
Once access is sorted, the remaining problem is attention. Reviews do not arrive on a schedule and they do not arrive in one place.
What you want is the same thing a messages app gives you. A single list, newest first, with something visually obvious marking what you have not dealt with. Not five tabs.
That is what we built Conversations for. Connect each client's Google Business Profile once and every review lands in one inbox. Filter to the ones that need an answer, work down the list, done. On Agency and Studio each business carries a per-client label, so you are reading "Harbour Dental" rather than a profile ID you have to decode.
A few habits that make it survive a busy month:
- Use a private note when a review needs checking before you reply, so the context is on the review rather than in your head
- Tag the recurring themes, because the third time "wait time" shows up it is a conversation to have with the client
- Flag anything that cannot wait until tomorrow, and trust the flag
Private notes, tags and the priority flag are on every plan, including Free. Replying from the inbox so it posts to Google is Pro and above.
Write replies that sound like the client
This is the part agencies get wrong in a specific way. A reply written in agency voice reads like a reply written in agency voice, and customers notice.
Keep a small set of starting points per client and edit them. Not a template you paste, a starting point you change. The bones of a good reply are the same everywhere: name what went wrong, say what changed, give a way to reach someone. The words around them should sound like the person who runs the place.
If you want the structure with an example, it is in how to reply to a negative review.
The reporting problem
The other recurring job is the monthly update, and it is usually built by hand. Open five profiles, copy the rating, copy the count, guess at the change, paste it into a document that takes an hour and gets skimmed for ten seconds.
Two things make that shorter. The first is deciding what the client actually cares about, which is almost never the average rating on its own. It is whether reviews are still arriving, and whether the recent ones are good. The second is having the numbers in one table instead of five tabs.
On Agency and Studio the analytics roll-up puts every business in one sortable table with the rating, the change over the period and how fast reviews are coming in, plus collection numbers and widget views, and exports the whole thing as a CSV. That is on Agency at €29 a month and Studio at €69.
Match the plan to the client count
Worth being concrete, because the limits are the thing people ask first.
- Free holds one Google business and one website
- Pro at €12 a month holds five businesses and one website
- Agency at €29 holds twenty-five businesses and five websites, and adds per-client labels
- Studio at €69 holds one hundred and twenty-five businesses and twenty-five websites
An agency with five client sites is comparing €29 against five separate Pro seats. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
Counting locations rather than clients, and what a plan comes to per location, is worked through in how many client businesses one review tool can hold.
What this looks like when it is working
Monday morning, one tab. The inbox shows what arrived over the weekend across every client. Four reviews need an answer, two of them are ordinary thank-yous, one needs a note and a check with the client before you write anything, and one is the kind of complaint that is genuinely useful.
Twenty minutes later it is done and nobody has typed a password.
That is the entire ambition. Not clever automation, just not doing the same five-step retrieval job over and over. If the collection side is also on your plate, the asking routine is the other half of it, and it is the half that decides whether there is anything to report on at all.
This article is about access. For what the inbox itself has to do to be worth having, see what a unified review inbox actually has to do. For the month-end side of the same roster, see review reporting across a client roster.
Once the workflow runs, the next question is what to charge for it: how to price review management for agency clients compares per-client, retainer and per-location pricing.
