McDonald’s is a wildly popular fast food chain across the globe. In North Carolina, there are three franchise groups owned by individual families and they truly care about their customers and their local community. They wanted to find additional ways to reflect their values to the public. fwd digital marketing was brought onto the team to assist with their Google reviews.

fwd digital marketing managed the Google review response and customer service follow up for 45 McDonald’s locations among the three individual franchise groups. In the course of responding and handling over 5,000 reviews, the fwd team identified four core business improvement opportunities for the franchise owners.

The customer feedback consistently fell into one of the four categories, and the fwd team gathered this data into reports for each store location, giving the owners the opportunity to coach and improve operations at each store.

On the public-facing side of the equation, the fwd team responded to every single review to ensure that each customer’s voice was acknowledged, regardless of star rating provided. The responses were intentionally authentic, sometimes using humor and sometimes using the customer’s first name, and always leading with empathy. The result was a brand that showed how much they cared with a real human touch. This set the three franchises apart from their competition.

The management, response, and follow up to these reviews also causes several one-star reviewers to return to Google and change their reviews to four or five star ratings.