Review Disposition Suggester

The advice SMBs get about reviews sounds good in isolation: "Respond to every review."

In practice that advice leads to one of two failure modes:

The owner tries to respond to every review, falls behind after week two, and ends up with a ghosted backlog that looks worse than ignoring them deliberately.
The owner batches responses and misses the 1-star review from a customer who mentioned "refund" and "lawyer" until it's already screenshot-shared on Reddit.

The actual useful advice: triage. Not every review needs a reply. Some need an immediate, careful reply. Some need a thank-you. Some can be safely ignored.

What the Review Disposition Suggester does

Paste a list of reviews with date, stars, and text. The tool scores each on three axes:

Impact. Star rating × review length × recency. A 1-star review posted yesterday with 200 words matters more than a 3-star review from 3 months ago.

Urgency. Sentiment × time since post. A review trending negative on sentiment that's less than 3 days old carries urgency weight; the same review at 3 weeks doesn't.

Tone sensitivity. Scans for legally-sensitive keywords (refund, lawsuit, attorney, discrimination, retaliation, fraud, scam, unsafe). Any hit bumps the priority dramatically and adds a SENSITIVE flag.

The output sorts reviews into four dispositions:

URGENT (score ≥60): respond within 24 hours, with care. Often 1-2 star + recent + specific complaint + sometimes legally sensitive.
MONITOR (score 30-59): respond within 72 hours. 3-star with specific issue, mixed-sentiment 4-star, delayed negatives.
ACK (score 10-29): respond within a week. Positive reviews deserve a thank-you; 4-5 stars with no complaint.
NONE (score <10): no action needed. 5-star one-line reviews, reviews that are essentially noise.

For every non-NONE review, a tone-matched draft reply is generated.

The legally-sensitive flag

The SENSITIVE flag fires on keywords that indicate potential legal exposure. When it fires:

Don't respond publicly without thought. Public responses become evidence in a dispute.
Acknowledge the customer's concern briefly + privately (phone / email).
Loop in counsel BEFORE the public response if the review mentions: refund dispute, lawsuit, attorney, fraud, discrimination, retaliation, threat.

The tool flags these; it does NOT generate the response for them. That's intentional — the drafting deserves human judgment.

The four disposition responses

URGENT response. Acknowledge the specific operational failure (gutter damage, late arrival, billing error). Apologize without admitting legal liability. Move details to private channel. Never argue publicly.

MONITOR response. Thank for the feedback, address the specific concern briefly, invite continued dialogue privately. Don't fight the reviewer publicly.

ACK response. Thank the customer by name if possible. Reference the specific thing they mentioned. Short. Warm. No upsell.

NONE. No reply needed. Google doesn't penalize un-replied 5-star reviews; your response rate is calculated against all reviews, which dilutes anyway.

The weekly cadence

Run the triage weekly. 30 minutes per week.

Monday morning: audit the last week's reviews. Note URGENTs.
Handle URGENTs first (24h window from the review, not from triage — if you triage on day 3 of an urgent review, prioritize by age).
MONITORs by Wednesday.
ACKs by Friday.
Skip NONEs.

Over three months, the reply-quality-per-review-received metric improves noticeably. Urgent reviews get thoughtful responses instead of rushed ones. Positive reviews get specific thanks instead of copy-paste.

The one operational pattern worth watching

If URGENT reviews cluster around a specific theme (always "cleanup," always "late arrival," always a specific crew member), the review-response strategy isn't the fix. The operation is the fix. Run Review Velocity + Sentiment Trend to confirm the trend, then fix the underlying operational issue. Responding well to an underlying operational problem just delays the next batch of URGENT reviews.

Fact-check notes and sources

Google Business Profile review response: Google Business Profile Help — Reply to reviews
Sensitive-keyword legal exposure: general legal guidance — consult counsel for specific matters
Disposition-based triage frameworks are standard in customer-service workflows (e.g., service-level agreements tied to urgency)

This post is informational, not legal or reputation-management advice. Mentions of Podium, BirdEye, GatherUp, ReviewTrackers are nominative fair use. No affiliation is implied.

Not Every Review Deserves Equal Response Time