[Emerging Tech] Turning Online Reviews Into Growth With George Swetlitz

George Swetlitz is the Co-Founder and CEO of RightResponse AI, a reputation management platform that helps location-based businesses win more customers by improving their visibility and credibility through strategic responses to online reviews. He previously served as CEO of Alpaca Audiology, a private equity-backed healthcare business that grew to over 200 locations nationwide. Earlier in his career, George worked at McKinsey & Company and held leadership roles at Sara Lee before advising CEOs and private equity firms on operational strategy and profitability improvement. He currently focuses on helping businesses turn customer feedback into actionable insights that drive growth and better customer experiences.

In this episode…

Online reviews can quietly undermine marketing spend, customer acquisition, and local search visibility, especially for businesses with multiple locations. When responses are generic or missing, strong operations may still lose prospects to competitors with better reputations. How can businesses turn reviews from a reactive chore into a real growth strategy?

George Swetlitz, an expert in AI-driven reputation management for location-based businesses, discusses practical ways to fix the problem. He emphasizes treating reviews as public marketing assets — encouraging positive feedback, responding in ways that highlight differentiators, learning from negative reviews, and using AI with guardrails to generate varied, accurate responses. George also highlights the value of combining response automation with human review for lower ratings, leveraging voice-of-customer analysis to spot patterns, and making review generation easier through text, email, and QR codes.

In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews George Swetlitz, Co-Founder and CEO of RightResponse AI, about using AI and customer reviews to drive growth. George also discusses why reputation affects conversion rates, how to keep AI responses accurate without sounding robotic, and what he learned as a non-technical founder building an AI-first business.