Terwolde increases the review response rate to 100% and saves 2.5 hours a week with Repmanager

Terwolde is a multi-location dealership group with a broad brand portfolio spread across various branches. In total, the group manages 24 individual Google Business Profiles. Each profile represents a unique combination of location and brand, and each has its own review stream, specific tone-of-voice guidelines, and importer-related performance expectations. 

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Wouter Oving manages marketing for the group and was responsible for keeping all 24 profiles responsive, consistent, and on-brand. The review volume across so many profiles is substantial, and the complexity of simultaneously monitoring various brand voices makes the work significantly more challenging than the raw numbers suggest.

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Every Monday morning started the same way: opening the first account, working through the weekend reviews, logging out, opening the second account, and repeating the process. Across 24 profiles, this switching alone consumed a significant amount of time, all before any marketing tasks could even be addressed. Some brands within Terwolde's portfolio have formal, premium communication expectations, while others are more accessible and direct. 

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Rapidly switching between these accounts, for each review across 24 separate login pages, demanded a level of sustained precision that was impossible to maintain flawlessly in the long run. The historical response rate of 73 percent clearly illustrates where the strain was felt. More than one in four customers who left a review received no response at all. This wasn't due to a lack of willingness from the team, but simply because there wasn't enough time to address everything. Importer KPIs made the consequences of this gap very real. 

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Response time and response rate are meticulously tracked by the brands Terwolde represents, and missed targets directly impact dealer rankings and annual evaluations. There's also a crucial detail that manual processes often overlook: when a customer edits an existing review and adjusts their rating, that review is counted again as a new submission for the response rate. Reliably detecting such edits across 24 profiles, without an automated system to flag them, was simply not realistic.

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Wouter's primary concern at the outset was specifically about negative reviews. Automatically responding to positive reviews felt like a manageable step. Allowing the AI to respond to a 2-star or 3-star review without human oversight felt like a different kind of risk. A poorly timed automated response to a tricky review could exacerbate a difficult situation and create a customer relationship problem that takes more time to resolve than the review itself.

Repmanager solves this with a layered approach that Wouter found comfortable from the start. All positive reviews are automatically answered, with the AI applying the correct brand voice and local context for each of the 24 profiles. Reviews below a set threshold are flagged and held until Wouter reviews them and a response is posted. 

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Automation handles the volume. Human judgment addresses cases where it truly matters. Edited reviews, which were invisible in the manual process, are now automatically flagged so that nothing slips through the cracks. All 24 profiles are managed from a single dashboard, meaning Wouter has a complete overview of the group's review activity without having to switch between accounts.

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When Wouter set the date filter in the Repmanager dashboard to the past 12 months instead of the overall view, the team's perception of their own performance completely changed. The historical response rate of 73 percent had cast a shadow over their sense of progress, even as results clearly improved month after month. 

Filtered to the most recent 12 months, it looked completely different: 97 percent and rising. The team had made significant, consistent progress for months without fully realizing it, because the historical number was always in view. Removing that number changed how the team internally discussed reputation management and gave everyone a much clearer picture of where they truly stood.

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Terwolde has increased its response rate from a historical 73 percent to 97 percent over the past year, reaching 100 percent in the most recent quarter. Every incoming review is now answered. The 2.5 hours of weekly manual typing work has been reclaimed and reallocated. Monday mornings no longer start with a backlog. Importer KPIs are consistently met, edited reviews are flagged and never missed, and the team now manages 24 profiles with a level of oversight and control that was previously unattainable.