Your Customers Are Coaching You: Brynn Gibbs on Using reviews and context to improve execution

Hey everybody. Welcome to today's webinar. Today we have Brynn Gibbs on, one of the most thoughtful franchise tech folks that I've ever met. She is the founder and the CEO of Consumer Fusion, which is arguably the most respected reputation platform in franchising. Brynnn. I think you have a pretty rare mix of knowing strategy and being a company builder, and knowing brands and unit level reality. I'm just really excited to have you on. I'm excited to talk specifically about reputation in the role of coaching, something that we both, live in. But before that, thank you so much for being here.

Oh, you just made my day. Thank you, Gary. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

So maybe let's start with your background. I know I did the one sentence, but for those folks that don't know your career and how you built this company, I think it's a fascinating story. So maybe start there.

Okay, sounds good. Hey everyone. My name's Brynn Gibbs. I'm the founder and CEO of Consumer Fusion. And Consumer Fusion is an AI-powered reputation management,

local listings and social media platform. I started the company in 2013, but I have been in reputation management since 2009. I actually started in the medical field, in dental. And when we sold off Consumer Fusion in the dental space, franchising was introduced to us. And how we built that platform for multi-unit locations is very similar to the need at the time that franchisors had for monitoring their brand's online presence. So we pivoted and shifted towards franchising, and I am so thankful that we did because Consumer Fusion is in all verticals, but franchising is by far the most near and dear to my heart. So we are bootstrap, which means, it's been a slower journey. But I have been able to keep control of that journey and I just, I'm so passionate about what we do, the brands that we help, the team that I get to do it with. And I'm just really excited to talk about AI and ops, and how reputation and reviews and

organic social play a role into what makes a brand strong online presence.

Amazing. And so, you know, before we dive into all of that and kind of understanding it, I'm curious, you know, what made you say that like, reputation management is a scaled problem, right? You know, the idea that it needs to be solved at the brand level versus a mom and pop shop doing it at the local level.

Cause you guys have been champions of that, you know, what was that journey like?

There's a big difference between, we refer to them as SMBs, but mom and pop shops

versus a brand, managing their online presence. A big piece is too many hands in the cookie jar. We always preach franchisors, corporate needs to have primary ownership and control, and there needs to be a process, a streamlined way that they are strategizing and managing their online presence.

Similar like a franchise model, it's successful because there's a cookie cutter process that everyone follows. So same thing goes into your strategy, when it comes to your franchisees with the tools at the local level to have them perform, to be visible online, but also to have it manageable for corporate.

So every brand we work with, we actually kind of customize what the strategy and what our service to the brand looks like because it's not one way for every single brand. Different industries require different things. There's different review sites per industry, where a brand is focusing on spending their ad dollars all play a vital part in it.

So one thing that we pride ourselves on is making sure we customize what that journey looks like with our clients and our partners so that they are seeing success at the brand level as well as at the local level.

That's super interesting that you guys customize your solution for every single brand you work with. But on the flip side, you also have a pretty strong understanding of the challenges that all brands see, right. The challenges are maybe not unique, but the solution needs to be unique. So I'm wondering if you can say, what patterns do you see across all these brands, across industries, more broadly?

For franchising specifically, franchisees don't want another platform that they have to log into another, you know, tasks on their daily to-do list. So really making it as plug and play and simple for them as possible. You're gonna say you have a hundred units you're gonna have around like 10 to 15 who are super proactive and they're constantly striving to get more reviews, and they're actively posting on social media, and they're actively updating GBP and their business information. But then the majority are just gonna be like, hey I, need and want you to do this for me. I don't wanna log into the platform. I'm not going to log into the platform. I just want it you know, set in place and handled for me. So I would say that has always been the biggest challenge specific to franchising, is just when you roll out and you onboard a brand, the education and the training given to the franchisee.

So A, they understand the value of the tools and the service that they're getting, but also so they understand what they do or don't have to do in order to be successful. So I would say for franchising, it's adoption, at all locations, that's usually a challenge. But then once we get enough data, and we have a really cool feature where can show top and lowest performing locations when it comes to listings, social, and reputation. So when we start showing the proactive franchisees who are crushing it on those three areas, then it gets the other franchisees excited, and then corporate has data to showcase like, hey, yes, you do have to give a little bit. Most of it is plug and play and automated for you, but if you could just do X, Y, Z, you could also be a top performing location.

I'm so excited to get to that top performer and bottom performer piece. Real quick though, just for those folks, right, we're recording this at the start of 2026, right? So with technology today, I imagine there's two different caNPS. There's the, what part of reputation management is handled end to end by tools like yours and AI, right?

Kind of autopilot if you will. And then what parts are still what we like to call human in the loop, in the sense that it might require a franchisee or a coach, or somebody that's sitting in that office to do something. Can you speak to, you know, when we're recording this, what is fully automated versus what requires that human touch?

Well, I'm a believer in, Consumer Fusion is powered by AI tools in every aspect. At the end of the day, especially franchising, still requires some human touch to execute fully. Whether it's coaching, whether it's a GBP issue, that you need to advocate with Google support on the franchisees behalf. Nothing can ever successfully be completely automated, and just AI, and just software. And so we always say, we are AI powered, but we have that perfect amount of white glove support so that you get, the healthy blend in the best of both worlds.

Do you wanna talk specific to coaching and ops?

I guess more broadly, yeah, just like, educating us on what the best in practice looks like today.

Yeah, okay. So, I mean, we'll start with reputation, 'cause that's kind of where we got our start, but we do so much more than negative review removal. But that is one example of something that can't be automated. So with the rise of social media, we have brands going viral for the wrong reasons, weekly. Things that you couldn't even imagine, like

angry ex-employees making fake video content on TikTok, it goes viral and then franchisees are unfairly victimized by these like fake reviews of people who have never even had an experience with their business who leave unfair reviews. No way to automate reporting that negative content. The franchisees, the brand, they wanna get it down as quickly as possible.

So like that's one example of many where we step in, help with white glove support. We have AI tools that kind of surface like, hey, this location is under a spam attack. These reviews violate guidelines with our AI tool. So we definitely lean and we can scale with brands and their unit volume size because of the AI tools and the automation we have in place. But at the end of the day, like software's not gonna execute what the brand needs in order to actually clean up the content that needs to be removed. So that's one example. Another is like for service based GBPs, Google Reverifications suspensions, total pain in the butt. Google's completely shifted how, Google Verifications work compared to two, three years ago. And our team will like hold a franchise's hand while they are doing video verifications.

And that's just something that corporate teams don't have the capacity to do. These franchisees need their LSAs launched, like they need their GBP verified and, live. So just things like that, that are crucial and, need to be done timely where you just, you can't automate that. So there are a few examples for you.

I love that. It's kind of the idea that there's certain things that require learning, right? And then it brings that human into the loop. There's certain things that are maybe somewhat, done automatically and then verified after.

We're living in a day and age too, where it's like everyone has AI chat and AI call center.

Absolutely.

When our clients and franchisees are like, oh my God, I get to talk to an actual person. Like they get so excited. I think it's a unique thing that most businesses are moving

away from. And dollars and cents wise, it does make sense, but that's kind of what separates us from the others.

Totally. So let's kind of talk to the intersection, between you and me, right? Which is we're at a performance coaching platform, you guys provide some of the most critical data in that. And, you know, I believe this so strongly, and you've said this before, that the most important person is the consumer, right? The customer, and you guys in many ways are monitoring the voice of the customer and pulling that data into a coaching conversation, right? So I, I guess, you know, I know I have my idea, but in your world, like what is the difference between a coach that sits there and understands what consumers are saying about a location versus the opposite, which is that it's, it's living off there, it's off doing its own thing, and I don't know, it's on autopilot.

Right? And those are two different worlds. So I'm wondering if you could speak to that.

Well, it all comes down to moving the needle. So AI listening is how we go about giving our brands this data and this information, and we can track certain keywords, we can track for certain employees, and these coaches can be alerted, but it also summarizes and rolls up by location, kind of what the issues are.

Also, I mean, we highlight positive sentiment as well, so it's not just

Yeah, of course. Yeah.

But normally, it's the lower performing locations, and then what those challenges are that the consultants and the coaches are looking to that data so that they can improve and put processes in place, for that location. So the consumer journey has drastically shifted, as we all know, AI search, AI summaries, it's caused complete disruption. Yes, the traditional like Google algorithm, local search, that is still relevant and important, but now brand's focus is AI search, being visible, and 40 to 50% of what makes a brand visible is their reputation.

And you can flat out act as if you were a consumer searching for your brand's services in an area. So let's just say ChatGPT. I need a roofer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Please recommend five honest, trustworthy businesses that I should look into. And then it will recommend those businesses. And then ask them, why did you recommend those businesses?

And it will flat out tell you, because of their online reputation. And, if you have multiple locations and there is negative content that can flow into these summaries and search results, it can negatively impact the other locations as well. So that's why brand consistency is crucial. But when I first got into reputation management, I was fighting for people to understand.

Cause they would say, oh, I'm five stars, I have 10 reviews. I'm good, I don't need to worry about this. Where I was trying to have them understand, no, it's all about continuing to feed the algorithms. You wanna have consistent reviews, you wanna be as detailed as possible, or have your customers be as detailed as possible within their reviews. I'll use myself for an example this last weekend. I wanted to take my family out to dinner. My husband wanted to watch the playoff game. I wanted an espresso martini. I wanted to look at the ocean, and I wanted it to be kid friendly. So it was the longest search prompt ever, but that's how people are starting to search.

And so where these AI algorithms get the information is from the content within reviews. So the more reviews that your brand and your local businesses can be getting, that just in addition helps your visibility, but then you can do AI review listening to get the honest feedback from your customers so that you can understand what is working and what's not working, and then make improvements accordingly.

So again, it all circles back to just kinda like how the consumer journey has shifted and changed, but there has never been for me selfishly, a better time to be in reputation management. But for business owners and for brands, there's never been a more crucial and important time for you to be on top of continuously earning more reviews. And then that's just a way that you can take what your customers are saying because these are live public review sites. So a lot of brands do traditionally, NPS. PE firms, they love NPS, Net Promoter Score.

I'm not dogging NPS, we offer NPS as service, but it's very controlled. You are sending emails or texts to your customers, specific customers at a specific time asking for their feedback.

It has like 11% average of response rate. When you are monitoring your social sites and your review sites, you are getting live public feedback and oftentimes it's feedback from your customers before they even choose your business. Like we help businesses and brands with call center negative reviews and like monitoring the feedback there. People who can't get anyone on the phone. Like it presents so many holes in so many brands, processes that they're ignorant to because they're spending their time surveying existing customers, and not focusing on what people are saying across all the different review sites and social sites. So I'm not saying don't do NPS, there's still value to NPS.

You can get the same type of data from your reviews that you can from NPS, but it's just what everyone is saying about your business. It's not controlled.

I think one of the cool things that you touched on, which we talk about a lot, is the idea that you know, there's kinda this evolution past the score, right? It used to be like one to five Google reviews sure, it's still there. There's still NPS score.

I believe NPS is 1 to 10 or something like that. You know, there's still like all this data that's speeding through, but then now there's this richer layer of, well, what happens when I can use hundreds, thousands of long format reviews that are being posted and use that to educate? And I know you just gave this example, right?

On the search side, but on the coaching side, right. A lot of what we do, and as you guys know, we sit downstream, folks like Consumer Fusion, we look at the reviews and one of the things that we see is callouts. This thing that I'm getting, you know, dozens of reviews, and one of them is that Jill just is my stellar performing employee, right? She just gets called out all the time. Every week, somebody's saying something great. And then somebody says that had a really pleasant experience, right? So this idea of using reviews to inform coaching so that, you know, a coach can show up and say, hey, Jill's your rockstar.

You should have everybody looking from her. I heard Billy had this unbelievable interaction with the customer, right? And like showing up and just by reading through, because there's all that rich data that's now being pulled into conversations with franchisee and coaches and eventually consumers.

I think it's a really cool thing and a really cool time.

And also we coach our clients, like regardless of what your industry is, but I'm just gonna use a, fire water restoration brand that we partner with. Every morning, their franchisees have a morning huddle with their techs and they will call out and read the reviews that they received from the day prior. Because they're coaching from inception, when their techs go and introduce themselves to their clients, the homeowners, they say like, I'm Todd, I'm here for X, Y, Z. If by any means you feel, I'm not providing you with a five star service, I need you to let me know. And then they check in continuously every interaction, every conversation that their techs have, they're saying, if you feel I'm not giving you five star experience, please let me know so that I can address it and fix it.

And then they incentivize their techs and they get a $50 gift card for every five star review that they receive. It's a win-win. The business, the brand, they are

continuously getting five star reviews. Customers are happy, they're getting five star reviews, they're spreading the word about the business. So just like it comes full circle. But then back to the coaching piece,

coaches need a little bit of support when it comes to the data that they're looking at as well. And that's why our AI tools make it so easy for the coaches to look at whether it's by location, three locations, a region, and they can see like, okay, so X, Y, Z territories, they're falling in the lowest performing location for listings and here is why.

And it actually, the AI tools will spit out why that specific location, that franchisee is lower performing compared to others. And they break that down on the social side, the listing side, and the reviews side. So when they go and coach the franchisees, they can say, Hey, let me show you what Alpharetta is doing. They're doing X, Y, Z. They got four new Google reviews, two new Facebook, two new Angie, they responded to the reviews. And so they can use another franchisee, 'cause franchisees love like the storytelling and visualization from other

top performing franchisees. So they have tools to actually like train up and educate. Like, hey, this is why you're falling here, but here's how we can fix it.

It's super plug and play easy for them to catch that location up.

I love it. I mean, it's coaching at every level, right? It's kind of pulling in that data, blending it in with financial data and you know, field reports and all those things that we pull in. And kind of bringing that into something that it's like coherent. Which is like every person that's in the business knows exactly what to do from a coaching perspective.

And what I love about what you just said of what that brand does is that it kind of pulls in. It's choosing reviews, but it's A, building it into the actual product, right? Because now their experience with the consumers better. B, bringing it into marketing. So you're kind of doing this organic marketing rather than, you know, paid.

So it's almost like a cheaper win. And it's, I would say it's more than a win-win. It's a win-win, win, however many times across the board, yeah. All across the board. So I know we're wrapping up on time. I was hoping that, if you have an anecdote or any stats or kind of anything about, the outcomes that your partners see, when they really deploy and when it's done right. I'd love to kind of just share that with everyone who's listening.

Well first I'm gonna toot your horn 'cause every brand that I have been connected with that uses you, sings your praises. And like you commented earlier, like once you can actually like bring the financials into the performance, it's a game changer. There is a stat that if your business goes up one star rating, that can be anywhere from 5 to 9% increase in your business's annual revenue. So when you look at your online reputation, 5 to 9%, that's huge. So it really is so important, especially with AI search and summaries, that businesses and brands take their online reputation as serious as possible. It is the most important organic method to exposing, you know, your business.

I love it. Well, I know we're wrapping up outta time here, Brynn, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for being a friend and a mentor to me and my company. I appreciate it so much. Thank you.

I appreciate you as well. Thanks for having me, Gary. Take care.