# Reputation Recovery Playbook

Use this playbook when the business has started to accumulate trust damage through negative reviews, public complaints, or visible inconsistency in how issues are handled.

## Negative-Signal Triage

Start by sorting public signals into four lanes:

- isolated negative experience
- repeated service-line issue
- operator or staff behavior problem
- listing or profile hygiene problem

The point is to identify whether the issue is local, systemic, or structural before responding publicly.

## Response Lanes

### Quick Clarification

Use when the complaint is valid but limited and the business can acknowledge it cleanly.

### Service Recovery

Use when the customer needs a direct human follow-up and the issue can still be repaired privately.

### Leadership Attention

Use when the complaint reveals a deeper operational pattern, reputational risk, or staff conduct issue.

### Platform Hygiene

Use when the public issue is partly caused by stale listings, wrong hours, missing callbacks, or outdated contact paths.

## Response Standards

- respond quickly, not defensively
- acknowledge the experience without turning the reply into a legal brief
- move the next step into a named recovery path
- avoid robotic template language for emotionally charged reviews

Public replies should signal seriousness, not just politeness.

## Escalation Timing

- same day for reviews describing active harm, billing confusion, or staff conduct
- within `24 hours` for ordinary negative reviews
- within `72 hours` for listing-hygiene complaints that point to a broken contact path or stale business information

## Internal Correction Layer

Every reputation event should raise one question:

What inside the business allowed this public signal to happen?

Review:

- call handling
- after-hours response
- estimate follow-up
- scheduling and reminder flow
- billing and collections messaging
- listing accuracy

## Review Operations Reset

Once the weak point is identified:

- repair the workflow
- retrain the owner or staff involved
- improve the customer-facing message
- restart review generation only after the fix is real

Do not try to bury a weak system with more review asks.

## Recovery Review

Review monthly:

- negative review themes
- response time
- unresolved public complaints
- complaints by location, service line, or staff role
- whether the underlying workflow was actually corrected

## Failure Modes

- apologizing without fixing the underlying process
- treating every complaint as a one-off
- using canned replies in sensitive situations
- pushing harder for new reviews before the system is steadier