Good reputation practices are the routines that maintain a high and stable public perception of a brand over time. They cover transparency in communication, responding to criticism, consistency between discourse and operation, responsibility to the community, and a consistent digital presence across all channels.
For a brick-and-mortar retail chain, these routines aren't a matter for public relations. In practice, they apply store by store, because it's the profile of each unit that the consumer consults before leaving home. According to Google, 96% of consumers search on Google before going to the store. This guide brings together seven practices, what to measure in each one, and how to sustain them at scale.
What are good reputation practices in practice?
Reputation is the accumulated result of what a company does, what it communicates, and what third parties publish about it. In other words, good reputation practices are the set of behaviors that keep these three aspects aligned, so that external perception corresponds to the reality of the operation.
The difference between theory and practice lies in frequency. Reputation isn't built in campaigns; it's built through routine: the daily review request, the timely response, and the updated profile information when the time changes. Ultimately, it's a maintenance job, and the effect appears in the accumulation.
In a network setting, there's a complication that's rarely addressed. Each unit has its own profile and average score, so the brand manages dozens or hundreds of simultaneous reputations. Furthermore, the network average masks the problem, because a store with a score of 3.2 coexists with another with 4.8 without the consolidated number revealing the difference. Therefore, the following practices need to be applied and measured on a unit-by-unit basis.
It's important to distinguish between digital reputation and institutional reputation. The former is what appears in search results and determines a visit. The latter circulates among the press, investors, and the market. The two feed off each other, and the most common mistake is focusing solely on the latter.
1. Transparency: never hide the problem from the public
Hiding a flaw is more expensive than the flaw itself. After all, in an environment where any customer can publish in seconds, omission doesn't prevent the information from circulating; it only transfers the narrative to the person who complained.
Transparency here means three concrete things: informing the customer about the problem before they discover it on their own, stating what has already been done, and indicating a deadline for what still needs to be done. For example, a company that communicates a product shortage, a change in hours, or a service interruption maintains trust even when delivering bad news.
There is a limit that must be respected. Transparency does not require exposing internal details, contracts, or third-party data. It requires not creating false expectations. Thus, promising a deadline that the operation cannot meet is the quickest way to turn a neutral customer into a public detractor.
In physical retail, the test is simple. If the information on the store's profile differs from what the customer finds upon arrival, the chain has already failed in this practice, regardless of the quality of service that follows.
2. Two-way communication: inform and also listen
Communication that only sends out messages is advertising. The practice of reputation requires feedback, that is, a real channel for the customer to say what they thought and the certainty that someone reads what they wrote.
Listening has two sources, and both matter. The solicited source comes from surveys that the company sends out after the service interaction. The spontaneous source comes from reviews that the customer publishes on their own initiative, which is precisely the material that the next consumer will read.
On the other hand, listening without responding doesn't count as listening. The cycle only closes when the company responds publicly, forwards the issue to the appropriate person to resolve it, and informs the customer of the outcome. Good customer experience management is exactly that, applied methodically and measured per unit.
The sign that the practice is working is observable from the outside. When the themes that appear in the evaluations change over the quarters, it means the company is correcting them. If the same theme repeats itself for a year, it means someone is reading and no one is acting.
3. Consistency between discourse and practice on the network
Consistency is what underpins everything that has been said so far. For example, a brand that communicates speed and keeps the customer waiting in line, or that talks about sustainability and maintains an irregular supplier, creates a distance that the public perceives and registers.
This gap has a commercial name: frustrated expectation. In fact, it is more damaging than the absence of a promise, because the customer who expected something specific feels cheated, and this feeling appears in the review text with much more force than a common disappointment.
In a network, consistency takes on an extra dimension. The standard needs to apply across all units because consumers don't distinguish between franchises and company-owned stores, nor between a region and its headquarters. A single unit that deviates from the standard contaminates the perception of the entire brand, which is why measuring by store isn't a refinement, it's a requirement.
To test the consistency of your network, compare three things: what the communication promises, what each unit's profile says, and what recent evaluations describe. Where all three don't match, that's where the priority lies.
4. Acknowledge the mistake and show what was corrected
Making mistakes doesn't destroy a reputation. What destroys it is making a mistake and denying it, or making a mistake and remaining silent. The response to a failure is interpreted as a demonstration of the company's character, and it remains on the record for years.
Next, an effective apology has three parts and dispenses with rhetoric. Acknowledge what happened without downplaying it, inform the customer of the correction already implemented, and open a direct channel to resolve the issue. Repeating the complaint in different words, without a solution, worsens the perception of the reader.
There's a benefit that often goes unnoticed. A customer who has had a problem successfully resolved reports the solution with more enthusiasm than they would report the absence of a problem, transforming the failure into social proof. This is the mechanism described in complaints to build customer loyalty.
What is unacceptable in this practice is discussing the merits of the case in public. Even when the company is right, open debate with a dissatisfied customer never improves the brand's image in the eyes of others.
5. Respond to each assessment within a fixed deadline
Responding to reviews isn't customer service, it's marketing. The response is read by the next consumer comparing options, not by the reviewer, and that's what makes it a communication tool.
This practice requires a defined timeframe and complete coverage, not selection. After all, responding only to compliments conveys the opposite of the intended message. The Harmo Platform operates with an 87% response rate and an average rating of 4.7 stars, processing 300,000 reviews per month, and this level serves as a benchmark for a network.
Therefore, the response rate to reviews is the most honest indicator of this practice, because it depends solely on the company. Average rating depends on the customer's experience. Volume depends on how many people were willing to write. Response depends exclusively on whether there is a process in place.
It's important to understand Google's review policies before setting up your routine. Asking customers for reviews after service is legitimate. Offering financial incentives to employees for reviews is not, nor is asking customers to mention the salesperson's name, which violates Google Business Profile policy. For difficult cases, the material on responding to negative reviews provides templates for different complaint types.
6. Social responsibility and community impact
Reputation is no longer evaluated solely by the product. The public considers how the company treats its employees, how it chooses suppliers, and what it gives back to the region where it operates, and this information is factored into the purchasing decision.
First, the practice begins internally. A well-treated team provides better service, and better service generates better reviews, in a direct chain that eliminates the need for campaigns. Next comes the supply chain: the network is publicly accountable for the practices of those who supply it, even without controlling them on a daily basis.
After that comes the environment surrounding each store. Physical retail occupies space in real neighborhoods, and what the unit does there appears in local reviews more often than most chains imagine. Diversity and inclusion initiatives fall into the same category of perception.
One important caveat concludes the point. Communicating social responsibility without operational backing has the opposite effect and fuels accusations of empty rhetoric. The previous rule applies here with full force: first the practice, then the discourse.
7. Consistent digital presence across all units
Digital presence is where all previous practices become visible. Address, hours, phone number, services, and photos must be consistent across the website, search engine profile, and social media for each unit.
Discrepancies between channels cost twice as much. It costs you ranking, because the local algorithm penalizes data inconsistency. And it costs you trust, because customers who arrive and find the store closed during the advertised hours will publicly report this. Google reviews quickly accumulate these types of complaints.
Maintaining this standard manually on a network is impractical. After all, hundreds of profiles change their hours on holidays, receive new photos, and change their phone numbers. Therefore, standardization needs to start with a single registration and be distributed automatically, with governance over who can change what.
The result of this consistency is measurable at the end of the day. It's what underpins the Drive-to-Store: the consumer researches, trusts what they see, plans their route, and shows up at the right store at the right time.
Reputation Awards 2026 and good reputation practices
The Reputation Awards 2026 consolidated 2025 data from 128 client brands of the Harmo Platform, 17,500 integrated stores, and 816,000 analyzed reviews. With this database, it's possible to test which practices sustain reputation and which only appear to, because each group of brands can be separated by behavior and compared by results.
The practice that most differentiates the groups is the response to evaluations. Brands with a response rate above 90% grew, on average, 14% in route requests during the period. Those below 90% grew 6%. And the five brands that did not respond to any evaluations registered a 1% drop in route requests. Not responding, therefore, is not a neutral stance; it is a decision with measured consequences.
The comparison between the extremes confirms the pattern. Among the 128 participants, the average response rate was 86.8%. The ten brands that grew the most in route requests operated at 89.0%, while the ten that fell the most were at 75.7%. The difference between leading and falling behind, in this indicator, is just over thirteen percentage points of operational discipline.
A second practice with a clear effect is the activation of promoter clients. The 44 brands that activated promoters grew 13% in route requests and 19% in views, compared to 11% in both for the 84 brands that did not activate them. These 44 closed the period with an average score of 4.6, compared to 4.5 for the others, and grew 61% in the number of reviews received, compared to 31%. The overall picture is one of progress: 70 of the 128 brands increased their score from the first to the second half of 2025, and the number of brands below 4.0 was halved, from 16 to 8. The complete breakdown by category is in the Reputation Awards 2026.
How to measure good reputation practices in your network
Practice without indicators becomes mere intention. Four numbers tell you if the routine is working, and they all need to be read individually, never just in the consolidated brand data.
The average rating shows the accumulated perception and defines who is included in the consumer comparison. 9 out of 10 consumers avoid stores with a rating below 4 stars, according to the Local Decision . The response rate shows if a process exists. The volume and recency of reviews show if the data collection is active. And the dispersion between the best and worst stores shows if the standard really applies across the entire network.
The fifth number is what links everything to revenue. Based on the Harmo Platform, each additional 0.1 star in the average rating corresponds to 8.8% more route requests. This is the Golden Correlation, and it allows you to calculate the return on investment of raising the rating of a specific group of units before investing in the effort.
With these five indicators, good reputation practices cease to be mere brand rhetoric and begin to have an owner, a goal, and monitoring, just like any other process in the operation.
How to maintain good online reputation practices
Seven practices applied in a store fit into a team's routine. Applied in hundreds of stores, they require a system. In practice, collecting feedback from all profiles, classifying topics by unit, responding within deadlines, standardizing registration, and monitoring indicators on a single dashboard is not work that a spreadsheet can handle.
The Harmo Platform organizes this layer as Drive-to-Store, with a digital presence, evaluations, and research in a continuous cycle, and FloraAI as transversal intelligence across all functionalities. Currently, there are more than 24,000 stores and more than 200 networks operating under this model, registering a 36% increase in route orders after 12 months.
The indicator that best reveals a network's maturity in this area is the distance between its best and worst performing units. When this distance shrinks, the average rises without depending on any exceptional store, and the flow responds throughout the network. It is this upward leveling that separates a network that manages its reputation from one that merely observes it.
Reputation is performance, and performance is governed store by store. Talk to a Harmo specialist to see these seven practices applied to your network.
Frequently asked questions about good reputation practices
What are good reputation practices?
There are seven: transparency in communication, active listening with feedback to the customer, consistency between discourse and operation, admitting mistakes and showing the correction, responding to each evaluation within a fixed timeframe, social responsibility and community engagement, and a consistent digital presence across all units of the network.
How can a company's reputation be improved?
Start by correcting the operational cause that appears repeatedly in the evaluations, then address the accumulated data, including older data, and then review the volume of recent evaluations. Perception improves through dilution with new material, not by removing old data. Finally, measure by store, because the network average hides the unit that pulls the result down.
How can a company reverse a bad reputation?
Reversal follows three steps in order and does not allow for shortcuts. First, correct the root cause of the problem, because reputation reflects the service provided. Then, publicly acknowledge what went wrong and demonstrate the correction. Finally, maintain the collection of new reviews for a few months, which is the actual timeframe for the rating to improve.
How long does it take to build a reputation?
It depends on the volume of reviews the store has already accumulated. A store with few reviews can move its rating in weeks, while one with thousands needs months of consistent collection to shift the average. Therefore, the recommendation is to maintain a continuous flow instead of concentrating efforts on one-off campaigns.
Who is responsible for managing the company's reputation?
Generally, marketing is responsible for the indicator, but execution is distributed. The store generates the experience, customer service responds to evaluations, operations corrects the root cause, and leadership sets the standard. Without a single owner of the indicator and a common system, the practice becomes diluted across areas, and no one is accountable for the result.