When are consumers going to rumble reviews sites?

It cannot be long now. Here is Spark Energy on Trustpilot ('Great')...

...and here it is on Google...

Today the spark went out - Spark Energy went bust. Which reviews will you - and your potential customers - be trusting from now on?


Further reading...

• 'Deflection' is what happens when dissatisfied customers write to Google rather than the business's reviews site of choice - you can see it's happened here.
• 'Fear' - the reason so many businesses opt for a reviews site is a well-founded fear that should they invite their customers to post reviews direct to Google their image there will be dominated by the 'unhappy minority'. That's why review management - HelpHound - exists, to ensure that the absolute minimum of unfounded, unfair, inaccurate and misleading reviews are posted.

Reviews - two out of three UK businesses are breaking the law

This article is important - every business should familiarise itself with all of its contents. You may well find - and you will be in the company of many others - that your current reviews policy is in breach of the CMA regulations in some way (there is a link to our analysis of these at the bottom of this page). If in any doubt whatsoever, contact us.

First - an Italian goes to jail...

This is Ebay UK. Advertisements such as this appear all the time. Why? The last line of this advertiser's 'puff' says it all...

Last week the director of a business selling fake reviews was jailed for nine months by an Italian court. But the important thing for businesses to realise is that this behaviour (we wonder what the Italian authorities will be doing about the customers who bought the fake reviews) was just the tip of a very large iceberg. 


Your business may well be breaking the law

We estimate that more than two thirds of businesses that we meet or see are breaking the law as it relates to reviews in the UK - mostly unwittingly.

The point is that, as any businessperson knows, ignorance of the law - unwitting breaches of the CMA regulations in this context - is no defence.

So let us look at the two distinct types of breach - first the intentional...

• writing your own reviews. You might - or might not - be surprised at just how many businesses do this. It commonly occurs when a business that has had no reviews receives a negative review. There is a panic - sometimes because the phone has stopped ringing - and someone says 'quick, get on Google and write a five star review'. We have a file full of such behaviour. How do we know? Because people don't think - they use an account that is easily linked back to them and then matched to a Facebook, Google Plus or Linkedin account. 

• connected person reviews. Remember the wording on the back of the Cornflakes packet (in relation to competitions)? Goes something like 'no connected person, employee of the company or employees of its suppliers and agents may enter'. We know of at least one business where all the branch managers agreed to get their staff to post a review of the next-door branch. We have seen multiple instances where a quick look at a reviewer's Linkedin account will reveal their connection to the business under review.

• cherry-picking. We sometimes come across people who genuinely - still in 2018 - do not understand that any behaviour that leads to any bias in the impression created by reviews and a business's reviews strategy is illegal. Hand-picking customers - those who the business knows are more than likely to write a 5 star review - whilst quietly ignoring those that are known by the business to be not quite so happy is just such a breach. How many times do we see a business with twenty or thirty positive reviews on Google - often considerably more - all gained by this kind of non-compliant selection? The answer? - multiple times a day.

• review farming. This is a refinement of cherry-picking - and illegal. It involves inviting customers to write a review to one location - it might be the business's own website or a reviews site, sometimes it involves using the business's internal feedback mechanism - and then inviting only those that write a complimentary review there to copy it to Google. It leaves a paper trail a mile long for the CMA to follow.

• the 'app trap'. Seen most commonly with apps (apparently apps live or die by their rating): the consumer is asked to rate the app/product/service and then - here's the 'clever' part - if they rate it five stars the 'review' is published, anything less and the 'reviewer' is diverted to a customer service questionnaire to establish why they didn't rate the business fave stars - and no review ever appears.

• incentivising. We have seen both cash and Amazon vouchers offered to customers, sometimes for 'a review' and sometimes for 'a 5 star review'. Both are against Google and most reviews sites' terms and conditions. The latter is a breach of the CMA regulations.

...and now the unintentional...

• using a reviews solution that breaks the law (1). Businesses might reasonably expect that most of the reviews solutions that are being actively marketed in the UK today are legal and above board. Take 'closed' reviews sites - those that allow the business to choose who is invited to write a review, but where a customer cannot write a review direct to the site. Sounds reasonable at first glance, doesn't it? But it's non-compliant with the core CMA regulations - that state that if a business invites any of its customers to write a review it must allow all of them to do so. We meet businesses using such solutions that think they are compliant because they do invite all their customers to write a review. The problem is that they don't see hat they are in contravention of the second fundamental CMA regulation that states that the consumer must be able to write their review at a time of their own choosing - and it's not enough to say that they can hunt out the email from months ago to do so.

• using a reviews solution that breaks the law (2). There are reviews sites that incorporate mechanisms that place the onus on the reviewer to prove that they have a) used the business in question and that b) their review is true. Surprising as it may at first seem, these also contravene the CMA regulations - not because the CMA wants to see reviews published by people who have not used the product or service under review, but because they realise that such mechanisms have the potential to be manipulated by businesses to deflect or delay uncomplimentary reviews.

• Reacting to negative reviews (or 'blitzing'). Commonly done by businesses that have had little or no prior engagement with reviews. The business in question gets one or more negative reviews and its reaction - quite understandably - is to do 'whatever it takes' to 'rectify the situation'. This will often involve a mixture of 'intentional' breaches - often justified by saying 'it was so unfair, the impression the negative review(s) created, we just had to do something, and quickly'. The business in question is invariably shocked when told that this behaviour is illegal.

Strategies - in addition to those above - that some businesses think are compliant include...

• including an invitation to post a review in their email signature block
• combining a review invitation with their CRM software to 'ensure all customers are invited to write a review'
• mentioning/showing reviews from a reviews site on their websites, but with no live feed
• showing selected reviews - from Google or a reviews site - on their websites

Advice

HelpHound will provide you with half-an-hour's advice free of charge (you can visit us or we will speak to you - phone or Skype). During that half hour we will look at your current review management policy and comment on...

• its effectiveness - in driving business and/or enquiries
• its compliance with the CMA regulations
• potential improvements

...after which you can decide whether you would like to understand more about what HelpHound does for its clients. 

Further reading...

• a full analysis of the CMA regulations

Estate agents - if you're paying Rightmove the best part of £1000 a month to list your properties....

...then surely it's worth investing just another hundred* to impress your potential fee-payers?

Let us explain. Your potential fee earners,vendors and landlords, all look at your website and almost all** search for you on Google. 

So why wouldn't you want to look like this...

...and this...

...and this...

...on your website?

And this...

...and this...

...and this...

...and this...

...and this...

on Google?

And there's more...

• you will be compliant with CMA regulations (that state that if you invite anyone at all to write a review you must allow all of your customers to write a review at a time of their own choosing).
• you will benefit from HelpHound's moderation - that will ensure, as far as is compliantly possible, that no inaccurate misleading or - dare we say it, fake - reviews appear anywhere
• you will have full-time support - to ensure you make the very best of the opportunity that proper professional review management brings

If you are still harbouring any doubts at all, first read this (it's all about how you will be able to tell exactly how many more calls and clicks-throughs you can expect) and then speak to one of our clients (if you don't know one, we will be happy to introduce you).

Oh! and HelpHound are review managers not a reviews site - this article explains the fundamental difference. 



*Less actually - from £95 downwards (discounts for multiple locations)

**potential clients coming from the portals often by-pass Google search

A familiar story

Last week we spoke to two businesses, both clients of two separate reviews sites - and this is what they had to say...

• Business one: "We adopted [this solution] because we were told that we could selectively invite customers to post reviews and that customers could only post a review at our express invitation."

• Business two: "We adopted [this solution] because we were told that, due to the sensitivity of our profession [legal] we would be able to have negative reviews suspended pending confirmation from the client that they had indeed conducted business with us."

So why were they speaking to HelpHound? both had come to realise that the solution they had adopted, combined with the way they had been advised to use it, was in contravention of the CMAs regulations.

Let us take each in turn...

"We adopted [this solution] because we were told that we could selectively invite customers to post reviews and that customers could only post a review at our express invitation."

The superficial attraction? Very simple - no business wants to attract negative reviews, so being able to restrict invitations to 'happy' customers looks great, until you check on compliance with the CMA regulations. Likewise customers being able to write a review by invitation only - which flies in the face of the CMA regulation that stipulates that any customer must be able to write a review at a time of their own choosing.

And...

"We adopted [this solution] because we were told that, due to the sensitivity of our profession [legal] we would be able to have negative reviews suspended pending confirmation from the client that they had indeed conducted business with us."

On the face of it? Eminently sensible; after all, what business - or potential client - wants reviews from people that have not experienced, first hand, the service under review? In theory, at least, this is a runner. But not in practice. The minute the business uses a mechanism that removes the right of the consumer - any consumer - to have their review, whatever its content - published, without unreasonable delay, and especially where the business has any influence over the duration of that delay, the business becomes non-compliant.

The conundrum - and its resolution...

The conundrum is simple: businesses want to look good, compliantly. The regulators, on the other hand, insist that the consumer always retains the right to have their review, whatever its content, published.

The solution is also simple: and it's called moderation. Every review at HelpHound is moderated - by a person, not an algorithm - and any that have the potential to mislead or misinform are immediately (or as close to 'immediately' as humanly possible) served to both the business and the reviewer, the rule being: the reviewer always retains the right to have their review, whether the original or a modified version, published at any time during that process.

The real-world outcome?

Look at any HelpHound client, and - with very few exceptions - what will you see? You will see a well-run consumer-focussed business represented by a very high proportion of positive reviews. What you are unlikely to see are two things...

1. A 'perfect' business, scoring 5 out of 5
2. Misleading or factually inaccurate reviews - at least in any volume

What you definitely won't see...

...is a review saying 'I was prevented from writing my review by HelpHound (or by a HelpHound client)' or 'the mechanism X business uses prevented me from having my review published'.

A typical HelpHound client - scoring 4.8 on their own website (with 123 reviews - four of which are negative) and 4.9 on Google (with two negative reviews out of 85). Every reviewer who has posted to the business's own site has been invited to copy their review to Google.

  The 'Rating' (4.8 and the stars, along with the number of reviews - 123) showing under their organic listing is taken by Google from the reviews hosted on the business's own website

And in local search? None too shoddy - and fully compliant.

In other words: the best of both worlds.

Further reading...

• The CMA regulations - a detailed analysis. A 'must read' for everyone
• Moderation - more on this important topic
• Resolution™ - the name we give to our moderation process

'Falling to Four' - the inevitable consequence of unmoderated review management

As regular readers will now, at HelpHound we like to coin a phrase ('resolution', 'deflection',  'review management' - we think we may even have invented 'moderation' in the sense that it relates to reviews), well here's another one to add to the list.

'Falling to Four'

'Falling to Four' is what happens when a great, well-managed and consumer-engaged business becomes proactive in the reviews space.

It means that no matter how hard the business tries to keep its score where it needs to be - as near to a perfect 5 as possible - its score, on Google or any other site will fall towards, and often past, the Google filter at 4.0.

Why? 

Because of human nature. When a business decides to become proactive with reviews (as all business should be) and therefore invites all its customers to post a review (as the rules state it must), roughly twenty per cent of those reviews will be negative - scoring the business one or two stars. The reason that so many reviews (remember we are discussing good businesses here) will be negative is simple: a dissatisfied customer is about fifteen times more likely to write a review than a satisfied one.

Let's look at some numbers - and then some examples. Let's say the business - over a period - invites a thousand customers to write a review (all they do is send an email, no incentive, no follow-up). What do we think the response rate might be? About 3% perhaps? That's thirty reviews.

Let's look at the motivation behind those thirty reviews - it will be one of two things...

• the business did a great job
• the business, in the opinion of the customer, did a bad job

But then we need to apply our multiplier ( x 15 remember?). If the business has managed to satisfy 97 out of 100 of its thousand customers that leaves a pool of 970 happy customers and 30 unhappy customers.

To reduce the business's score from 5.0 (assuming their very first review scores them 5 stars) to 4.0 only six of those thirty need respond. And they will!

In this example nine out of the thirty-nine reviews posted are negative...

...and here they are again on an independent site...

...'Falling to 4' again.

There is only one solution that we know of...

...and it's not 'cherry-picking' (selecting happy customers to write reviews - against the CMA regulations - see Point 4 here).

We call it Resolution™.

There's a very detailed explanation here - it is essentially an advanced form of moderation. It is not designed to filter out negative reviews or to give the business any unfair advantages. What it is is a mechanism designed to add value for all concerned...

• value for the consumer, by improving the accuracy of the reviews
• value for the business, for the same reason
• value for Google, for the same reason

...by enabling the business and their customer to engage if the review contains any potentially inaccurate or misleading statements.

No one benefits from inaccurate reviews - and we see them every day. When we first introduced Resolution™, some years ago now, we wondered how consumers/reviewers would react - the numbers continue to amaze us: over 95% of reviewers welcome the opportunity to address the issues Resolution™ brings to their attention - partly because, under the HelpHound system, they know that they always retain the right to have whatever review they wish published, even if it is at odds with the facts (remember, businesses have the right to respond).

In addition, our system - which automatically invites everyone who posts a review to copy it to the business's Google page - is blind to the content or score of that review.*

*We know of at least on reviews site that has a superficially similar mechanism, minus the invitation to post to Google, but when the review is finally published it is published as of the date it was originally written; this benefits the business in question because it can often result in the review being pushed down onto page two. HelpHound reviews are always posted to the date of final publication.

Google ban Review Gating. Hooray!

  The recent important change to Google's content policy

For years now we have sometimes been frustrated by our inability to convince some businesses that gaming Google was a bad idea. Read the 'Introduction' below and then we will go into some detail on 'Gating' and the other mechanisms both businesses - and some reviews sites - use to bend (more often break) the UK CMA rules and Google's terms of service to their advantage.

Introduction

Reviews exist for one purpose - and one purpose only - to assist consumers when it comes to making an informed choice as to which business or service to buy or use. 

The expression 'informed choice' is critically important here: for reviews to be effective they must be trustworthy, not 'a bit trustworthy' or 'mostly trustworthy' - just trustworthy. That does not mean to say that every reviews system must be perfect, but to deliver it must do its very best to ensure...

• accuracy - the reviewer should only review a business or product they have personal first-hand experience of
• transparency - anyone should be able to post a review at a time of their own choosing
• lack of bias - the reviews system should not favour the business or product being reviewed

and there are rules in place to enforce that, the UK CMA regulations (again!) and now Google have added anti-gating to their term of service.

Why? And what were/are they doing?

Service businesses (as opposed to online retailers - which can live with a Google score as low as 4 out of 5 stars*) realised some time go that just one well-written Google review had - and increasingly has - the ability to 'stop the phones ringing'. Often they then adopted one of the following four strategies described below...

*while a score of 4 out of 5 may look alright, even good - at first glance - it will deflect customers from making contact with service businesses. Why? Because a business scoring that 4.0 with 100 reviews will have up to 20 one star reviews, and those will be read by prospective customers, and will put a significant number off taking the next step: contacting the business.

1.  Denial

  

Here's a typical local search - the kind most people seeking a business make every time. What have the three business's listed in the Google knowledge panel (the holy grail of SEO) done to say 'come to us, we're great at what we do'? Little or nothing - classic cases of 'Denial'.

Denial was definitely the simplest solution - and was adopted, consciously or unconsciously, by many. It involves ignoring Google reviews altogether. They just did not engage - and hoped that their customers would not write [negative] reviews to Google.

   No reviews until three months ago and then...a Google score of 1.0 (and failing the Google filter). Not helped by the fact that the review is written by a Local Guide (their reviews are given more weight, both by Google and by users)

Consequences: Initially - no Google reviews to encourage those searching for a 'consumer qualified' business to click through a search to that business. Ultimately - two things: first, the business's first review is highly likely to be a negative one (simply because human nature dictates that a dissatisfied customer has so much more motivation to write a review), starting their Google score at 1.0 out of 5, second: the business will increasingly stand out against its 'engaged' competitors, some of whom will be doing 2, 3 or 4 below.

2.  Cherry-picking

This (score and number of reviews) is, of itself, no proof of cherry-picking. But when you know the business and its staff, both current and previous, its competitors and ultimately the regulators (especially if a complaint is made) take an interest, and then combine this with the pattern of reviews, then there is cause for concern.

This is the next obvious step on from denial (and by far the most popular - especially when the business has received a negative review and is in 'panic mode'): simply ask only proven 'happy' customers to write reviews.

Consequences: Initially: the business looks great - of course it does. But this practice was outlawed by the UK Competitions and Markets Authority in 2015. Read their regulations - which apply to all UK businesses - here.

3.  Independent reviews sites

Use an independent reviews site that offers some kind of filtering mechanism, either restricting consumers' ability to write a review: allowing the business to determine to whom and when the review invitation is sent/locking out anyone else or incorporating a mechanism that would lessen the impact of that negative review: allowing the business to challenge it and then insisting on 'proof of purchase' before publishing the review - forcing the [negative] reviews down the reviews timeline (who reads page 2?). 

Consequences: this drives disgruntled customers to post to a site that does allow them to post a negative review, a syndrome that we call 'Deflection' (a 'must read'). Which site? Maybe Yelp, maybe TripAdvisor (in the case of hospitality) but the overwhelming site of choice in 2018? Google. This results in the business looking good on the reviews site but much less good on Google - in other words, it is not only contravening the regulations, it is also backfiring on the business in the worst possible way.

4.  Gating

Put simply: use a mechanism to establish which of the businesses customers' were most likely to write a 5* review and then invite all of that subset to post a review to Google. Very common with apps, where good reviews scores are everything, and increasingly common with all other kinds of business.

When a business has few reviews (with mixed results) on Google for an extended period, but many on another reviews site and then suddenly acquires a flood of great Google reviews, it raises suspicions of gating. We have obscured anything that could identify the business in question because that would be unfair, but it would be easy for the regulators to conduct an audit and equally easy for Google to spot if such behaviour had been happening.

This is done in one of two ways...

• send out a private email survey asking customers to report their experience to the business, then ask only those that respond positively to write a review to Google

• use an [innocent] and relatively invisible - in terms of its Google profile - reviews site, gather all the reviews there and then only invite those that post a 5* review on the reviews site to copy that review to Google

Consequences: until now - few. If a competitor noticed then they might use that against the business: 'Of course their Google rating is excellent - you do know they are only inviting happy customers to post reviews?' - and also a form of cherry-picking (see 2 above).

an example of a TripAdvisor 'red flag'

Now: Google will delete the suspect reviews. And we don't know yet what other sanctions Google will apply (TripAdvisor and Yelp 'red flag' businesses in similar circumstances) but it is possible that Google will deem that all the reviews of the business in question - and their vital reviews score - have been acquired by gating. 

   

One version of a Yelp 'red flag'

On top of this, gating contravenes the CMA regulations, which are expressly written to ensure consumers get a full and fair impression of the business in question.

In summary

We have a great deal of sympathy for businesses that have adopted one of the above means of protecting their reputations from what they, mostly quite justifiably, see as unwarranted or unfair attack on the most important platform on the web - Google, as long as they have done so in all innocence.

Some readers - certainly regular readers - may be surprised at this statement, but we can assure you that we meet such businesses on a daily basis. They genuinely did not know that they were doing anything wrong. And they certainly did not know that there was a solution that would achieve the following legitimately...

• great flows of independently moderated reviews to their own website
• onward flows of reviews to their Google listing - to show in all searches

Welcome to HelpHound.

Further reading

• The CMA rules - explained
• Deflection - the unintended consequence of employing an independent reviews site
• Why scoring 4 on Google is not enough - for high-value service businesses
• Cherry-picking - a detailed analysis
• How a single well-written negative review can seriously damage a business - a case history
• There's no need to break the rules - results like these are achieved without adopting any of the strategies outlined in 1-4 above
• The three simple reasons businesses join HelpHound

A sorry P.S.

We thought the world had moved on from this, but still some businesses persist in misnaming testimonials (selected customer opinions) as reviews...

...just to be absolutely clear, reviews, by definition, must be independently moderated, otherwise consumers are being misled. Some businesses are confused by the likes of...

...online retailers (John Lewis here) that host 'their own' reviews. In reality, of course, these reviews are not 'of John Lewis', they are 'of the product', manufactured by someone else (and in reality they are hugely helpful for the retailer - as well as the consumer - which will simply drop any line that scores badly). 

Deflection - it's becoming an epidemic

Let us define 'Deflection': it is what happens when a business invites its customers to post their opinions on a review site instead of Google, it is as simple as that.

What happens next is human nature at work: happy customers do as they are asked - and post their review to whatever reviews site the business has chosen. Less happy customers 'rebel' and post to Google.

Added to that: businesses that ignore the CMA regulations (that state that if a business invites reviews from any of its customers you must enable all its customers to write a review) by not inviting customers they know to be unhappy with the service they have received are leaving those customers with only one option - to express their dissatisfaction by posting a one star review to Google.

It is probably best illustrated with real-life examples (we are using estate agency here, because the 'deflection' is so marked with them, but the principle applies across the board, whatever the business)...

Here is one that is rapidly attaining mythical status:

If you look closely (and how many searchers do that these days?) you will see that this business is rated 4.7 (or 4.8) out of 5 on an - unspecified - reviews site (it is actually allAgents.co.uk). BUT 1.0 on Google - which is not only displaying that score in the business's header, but prominently displaying it again when the potential customer scrolls down and reinforcing that negative impression with both rich snippets and the reviews themselves.

What we have here is an example of three of the business's dissatisfied customers completely dominating the impression of that business in search.

Why has this happened? What follows is an educated guess - but a highly educated guess nonetheless. Bradleys joined allAgents.co.uk way back at the end of 2012 - long before Google reviews were a viable solution for businesses. They put a massive effort into becoming the dominant business in their local area on that site - and have succeeded in spades. 

Then Google came along. What should have happened then? Well, at some stage Bradleys should have realised that they needed to reassess their reviews strategy.

The same search, but this time on desktop (less than 30% of search these days): the reviews site is showing, but Google is a) so much more prominent and b) has name/brand awareness out of all proportion to the reviews site (note: both scores under 'Reviews from the web' in the Google knowledge panel are derived from the reviews site; the disparity is caused by a time-lag in Google retrieving the score from the business's own website).

Why didn't they/haven't they? We don't know, but we guess (again) that there is a marked reluctance among management and staff to abandon a solution that they have put so much effort into, combined with loyalty to a business relationship that has lasted over five years. One thing is absolutely certain: our advice would be to refocus all their efforts on Google.

Another business and another reviews site...

...and on Google?

...and, just for good measure (and to show that we are not picking on any one site)...

...on Google...

So why do businesses continue to use reviews sites?

The reasons are many and various, but none of them are valid in 2018...

• the aforementioned loyalty; and we often hear 'but we've put in so much effort'
• 'advantages' promoted by the sites - notably 'stars in search' and moderation of negative reviews (not always complaint with CMA regulations)
• awards - estate agents are particularly partial to awards, and both allAgents (with their own) and Feefo (with their tie-up with the ESTAS) play that card
• contracts - a business should never sign up to a reviews solution that ties them in to any contract period, for whatever reason

And the final clincher? Reviews sites have sales forces and Google doesn't (not for reviews anyway)!

An important note on compliance...

Before you rush headlong into getting your 'happy' clients to post a review to Google please bear in mind the compliance issues of adopting such a strategy. It is in direct contravention of the CMA's core regulations - and those have the force of law. We meet with businesses every day that say 'it can't do any harm' or 'we had to protect our reputation' and even 'we won't leave a paper trail' (as if the regulators are that naive - they rely most heavily of all, we are reliably informed, on whistle-blowers - disgruntled ex-staff and competitors in the main).


Further reading...

• Is a reviews site strangling your business?
• The CMA regulations - and our analysis of them