Background

Online reviews provide a wealth of customer experience data and can help uncover issues that may have a negative impact on your business. But monitoring and responding to thousands of reviews is expensive and often too time-consuming for multi-location businesses to do consistently. Unanswered reviews can frustrate customers and deter prospects.

Founded in 2004, European Wax Center is a beauty lifestyle company that offers hair removal services and products at its more than 700 plus U.S. franchise locations.

Recently, the company was confronted with the challenge of its locations’ average ratings being stagnant. A strategy was needed to improve the ratings through better review and location data management.

Challenges

European Wax Center has a dedicated guest relations team that ensures the brand delivers an excellent guest experience across all centers nationwide. The team was having trouble monitoring and tracking online reviews for all of its franchised locations.

“A small percentage of centers were responding to reviews,” said Christelle Christie, Director of Guest Experience. As a result, overall response rates were low — only 11% — and as a brand, they wanted to ensure that their guest’s feedback was being heard. Brand consistency is important when communicating with guests. “Without templates, we risked location managers sending out responses that were not in line with our brand messaging — or not responding at all,” she said.

Christie and her team knew that locations had to engage more effectively with guests and use feedback in online reviews to improve the customer experience. “It was the best way to use that information to increase our average star ratings and reputation score,” she said.

Solution

Reputation.com made it easy for each individually owned and operated European Wax Center to monitor and respond to their center reviews.

The platform monitors reviews across search, maps and hundreds of review sites from a single dashboard, then aggregates the data and sends alerts to the team in real time. Additionally, location managers can leverage approved templates to streamline and standardize review response across locations.

“Reputation.com provides pre-made templates that make responding to reviews so much easier and quicker for center managers,” said Christie. “They can spot negative reviews immediately and address them right away to help turn around negative sentiment.”

Insights Help Improve the Customer Experience

Every franchisee has access to Reputation.com’s Analytics and Reporting capabilities to gain valuable insights about sentiment trends and trouble spots.

“The data is broken down by location, so it’s easy to identify and address issues,” she said. “With this information on-hand, Franchisees can make targeted operational changes that improve the customer experience.”

Importantly, Reputation.com helps the team at European Wax Center distinguish first-time guests from repeat guests. “We value all of our guests, new or loyal, and appreciate the first time guest feedback as it allows us to see how we can improve our first impression,” she said. “Reputation. com’s word cloud helps us identify new guests by highlighting the words ‘first visit.’ We can reach out to them immediately if they have an issue, and it helps us improve guest retention.”

Results

In under a year, European Wax Center:

• Increased Reputation Score by 30% (from 458 to 595)
• Doubled the review response rate from 11% to 22%
• More than doubled positive reviews per month, from 701 in April, 2017 to 1,427 in March 2018
• Improved average star rating from 4.5 to 4.6

“With Reputation.com, we’ve doubled our review response rate as well as the number of reviews we receive,” said Christie. “Just by increasing engagement and being aware of guest feedback has helped us make improvements in the way service is delivered across our locations, resulting in higher ratings which help our search rankings and improve our overall Reputation Score.”