By On Point Tech Solutions
You Got A Review In A Language Nobody On Your Team Reads
There is a review sitting on your profile right now that you have not answered.
Not because you are ignoring it. Because you opened it, saw a language you do not read, and closed the tab thinking you would come back to it.
That was four months ago.
I see this constantly around here. San Jose, Los Gatos, the whole valley. A shop gets reviews in Spanish and Vietnamese and Mandarin, sometimes Tagalog, and the owner answers every English one within a day and lets the rest pile up untouched.
The customer who wrote it can see that. They can see you replied to the guy below them and not to them.
They are worth exactly the same
Let us get this part out of the way, because it is where people get stuck.
A review in another language counts. It counts in your total. It counts in your average. It sits on your profile in front of anyone who reads that language, which in most Bay Area neighborhoods is a lot of the people searching for what you sell.
It also often comes from your most loyal segment. People who found you through their own community, who told their family about you, who are not price shopping. Those are not reviews to leave face down.
And Google shows most people a translated version by default now, so an English speaker reading your profile is very likely seeing the content of it anyway. The only person treating it as unreadable is you.
Read it before you answer it
Do not reply to a review you have not actually read. That is how you thank somebody warmly for a complaint.
Google will offer to translate it right there. Use that, and then use one more tool to check, because a machine translation of a short casual sentence can land wrong in a way that matters. Slang, a joke, a bit of sarcasm, a word that means two things.
If the review is negative, do not stop at the machine version. Find a human who speaks it before you write a word. Somebody on your team, a family member, the customer's own words read out loud by anyone who actually speaks it. The difference between mildly annoyed and genuinely angry does not survive translation reliably, and your reply has to match the temperature.
Reply in their language, then in yours
Here is the format that works, and it is simple.
Write your reply in their language first. Then put the English underneath it.
Not because the English is for them. Because your reply is public and it is being read by everybody who lands on your profile later. The person who wrote the review gets a response in the language they chose, and every future reader gets to see that you did that.
That second part is worth more than people think. A prospective customer who speaks Vietnamese, scrolling your profile, seeing you answered in Vietnamese, has learned something about your shop that no line of your website will tell them.
Keep it short. Two or three sentences. A short reply translates cleanly and a long one does not.
Do this
- 1Sort your reviews and find every one you never answered. The non-English ones will be most of them.
- 2Translate each one with Google's own translation, then check it against a second tool.
- 3For anything negative, get a human who speaks the language to read it before you write.
- 4Write the reply in their language, put the English under it.
- 5Keep it to three sentences so the translation holds.
- 6Use their name if they left one, spelled the way they spelled it.
- 7Go back and clear the backlog. Old ones still count and are still public.
- 8If a language keeps coming up, find one person you can text a screenshot to. That is your whole system.
Then go and ask in that language
The reviews you got in another language are telling you something you should act on rather than just answer.
If a chunk of your customers are more comfortable in a language other than English, then your review ask is in the wrong language too. You are asking in English, at the counter, to somebody who is being polite about how much of it they caught.
Ask in their language. Even badly. Even if it is one sentence you learned off a card taped under the register, and you are the only one in the shop who tries. It lands.
Same with the text you send afterward. If you know the customer speaks Spanish, the follow up should be in Spanish.
The friction is doubled for them
Everything that already makes reviews hard is harder in a second language.
Finding your business by typing the name into a search, when the keyboard on their phone is set to a different language and the name is spelled in English. Getting through a sign in screen. Working out which of the two similar listings is you. Every one of those steps costs a person more when the interface is not in their first language, and every one of them is a place they give up.
Which is why the ask that ends in a tap does better here than anywhere else. There is nothing to spell and nothing to find. The phone opens the right page, and the only thing left is the part they actually wanted to do, which is say something nice about you. That is what the card at shop.optechsol.llc is for.
What it comes down to
An unanswered review is a review you left on the floor, and the ones in other languages are the easiest to leave there because nothing about them nags at you.
Go clear them out this week. Reply in their language with the English underneath. Then fix the ask so the next one comes easier than the last one did.
Your customers already crossed a language to come and spend money with you. Meeting them a few steps of the way back is not a big lift.