Schools - their marketing and reviews

Here is a collage of advertisements from last week's Spectator Schools supplement:

All of which, one assumes, in marketing-speak are 'setting out to enhance their brands'.

So why would this collage of reviews and scores apply to any of them? 

It does not - it applies to each and every one of them (except one that has no reviews at all).

Before you say 'But one scores 4.7!' we would respectfully point out that that score is based on reviews by tourists, not parents or students. Here's a breakdown (no names...):

From this small - but representative - sample we can only draw one conclusion: that educational establishments in the UK have yet to engage with reviews. 

The argument for engaging

The average age of a prospective school parent - the principal target of those advertisements - must fall between the ages of thirty and forty-five. They are what marketing people call classic Generation Y - here's the dictionary definition:

Note 'typically perceived as increasingly familiar with digital and electronic technology'. That means they do the following when the see an advertisement (or receive a personal recommendation, or scour the league tables):

• google the business - in this case the school

At this point the business - the school - should be asking itself 'What impression do we want to create for our prospective parents - these highly new-media-literate individuals?' Among the answers we would expect to hear:

• Great reviews - by parents and pupils
• A great Google score
• Independently verified reviews when they click through to the school's own website

Now we know all that is easier said than done; it is why HelpHound exists - to navigate your school through the minefield that is the world of reviews, to ensure that Jones minor of the Remove does not make a nonsense of your Google reviews and that the school is able, as far as possible, to present itself as it really is through the medium of reviews.

The solution

The school invites parents to submit reviews to its own website; the reviews are moderated by HelpHound: positives are published to the school's website, negatives are sent to the school for comment (a process called Resolution™). The parent is then asked to copy their review to Google.

Here we should address a common concern: fear of alienating parents by asking them to write a review. We would advise anyone hesitating to invite reviews for this reason to read this article for reassurance.

The result 

Great independently verified reviews for parents to read on the school's own website. Great reviews to Google - and any issues resolved pre-publication. A great first impression online - even if the only reason a prospective parent has googled the school was to find its telephone number.

And finally - those spurious reviews...

These fall broadly speaking, into one of the these two categories:

• Malicious reviews containing allegations of illegality by the school, its students or its employees
• Reviews of the school's history, location, grounds or architecture

Google take a hard line against malicious reviews, but their appeals process is a minefield for the unwary. HelpHound have the experience and the expertise to guide you through the appeals process.

Google are unlikely to take down the second category - after all, they are helpful for tourists. It is incumbent upon the school to make sure that the overwhelming majority of reviews relate to educational and pastoral excellence.

Review Site or Review Management?

This is the choice facing every business now that the 'engage with reviews or not?' argument is settled. We have written this article so you can understand which - using a review site or embracing review management - is right for your business.

Are you in (online) retail - or professional services?

If you're in high-volume retail one of the 'off-the-peg' solutions is a good starting point. You will get reviews and you will be given a feed and a link to embed into your own website. You will get negative reviews - often relating to your delivery service or your website/payment method, not the product - but having this kind of reviews channel is better than no channel at all.

If you are in high-value professional services you will do well to consider review management. Being a professional service itself, it will be tailored to suit your own needs and band identity and will be much more effective in addressing the issues raised by your customers/clients/patients/guests that won't benefit anyone by being given a public airing on the web.

It may cost more than an off-the-peg solution (probably - but not always), but you will have to make a decision about the value it will add, just the same as any professional service you employ. It should pay for itself by...

• aiding customer retention
• driving new business
• improving your image online
• being infinitely flexible - from the point-of-view of both design and function
• being future-proof - infinitely adaptable whatever direction Google and the web take

If it does not, don't hesitate to look for another solution!

Do you provide a product or service that is universally known and understood?

If you are a world-renowned fast-food franchise or you provide a simple service such as motor MOTs you may fare well with a review site. If you are a restaurant, hotel or motor sales and service centre the decision will be less clear cut. If you provide high value services - legal, financial, estate agency - where misunderstandings can easily arise through lack of customer knowledge, leading to inaccurate and misleading reviews being published - you should almost certainly choose review management.

Do negative reviews hurt - or might they even add value?

One of the most common urban myths surrounding reviews says "You need the odd negative to lend credibility." We would ask you to stop and think about this for a second. Here are two examples:

• "The shoes did not fit"
• "Their service was unprofessional"

If the kind of complaints you receive fall mostly into the former category, you may suit a review site. If they are more likely to be critical of your service than your products - you would do well to consider review management.

Because review management will allow you to engage with the person commenting pre-publication.

How do you want to display reviews on your website?

Do you want them to conform with your own brand image - or are you happy to embed an external review site's design into your site? There is no hard and fast answer here - except your own preference.

Own you own reviews or lease them back from a review site?

A review manager will advise you how best to collect and display reviews from your customers - wherever you want, whenever you want. The reviews themselves will remain your property, to use as you wish, even if you change review managers.

With most review sites the reviews become the intellectual property of the review site itself. They then either...

• allow you to use and display those reviews under certain conditions and circumstances or...
• charge you for certain enhancements - commonly up-rated listings and displays

As a company we have issues with those review sites which charge their clients to provide them with a feed of their own customers' reviews - some time ago we christened them 'hostage sites'.

Linking away

More important than people often think, providing your customers with a helpful link to an external review site has its disadvantages: foremost among these is the return rate. Reliable estimates put this at less than 15%. That's five out of six potential customers who won't return to your site once they've followed en external link. Small businesses commonly think that lots of helpful links will enhance their visitor experience and their SEO at the same time - so the B&B embeds a link to the local tourist board who helpfully provide links to their competitors. The same happens with sites like TripAdvisor (who make their 'Certificate of Excellence' conditional upon a back-link). 

If customer retention on your website is an important consideration, then you should be seriously considering review management.

Do people visit the review site in question unprompted by you?

If the answer, as it is in the majority of cases, is "No, they rely on us to direct traffic to them" (notable exceptions are the likes of Facebook, Yelp and TripAdvisor) then you should think twice before you effectively add value to those sites and pay them into the bargain.

What if you consult a review manager and a review site is best advice? 

They should advise you accordingly. Review management differentiates itself from review sites in that it provides advice, it does not sell a product. Some review management services may have products to help their clients manage review - in the way that HelpHound has Dialogue (the software that enables our clients to collect and display verified reviews) - but at their core they are purveyors of professional advice.

What if you are already contracted to a review site and you need review management?

Using one does not preclude using the other. We have often advised clients to use review sites in the past; and we have clients that currently use review sites. Part of a review managers' professional role is to stay abreast of all the review solutions and advise their clients accordingly. You will see constant references to specific review sites on this blog - and they appear in the tag cloud in the column to the right of this article.

Parallels

Think of a review site as...

• accounting software

and review management as...

• your own accountant (who may provide or recommend software)

In summary

A ten minute - free - chat with a review management professional is always time well spent. It will be all it takes to set you on the right road - the road that suits your business best.

Reviews - the Future is here - now!

So many fundamental changes have happened in the world of reviews in the last few weeks - mostly thanks to Google - and they make this update essential reading. Unless you are already a HelpHound client, that is. Actually, we take that back - it's essential reading for clients as well!

So what has happened?

The Google filter

 Early days, but we predict that the only filter users will ever choose will be the 4 star

Two screenshots of the same mobile search; the one on the left is unfiltered, the one on the right has the filter applied. The impact is clear for anyone to see - every single business except Franco Manca is filtered out - and Portobello is only a handful of 1, 2 or 3 star reviews away from being filtered as well (for falling below the 4.0 threshold). They are replaced with businesses - albeit farther from the searcher's location - with scores of 4.0 or greater

The filter, which was introduced for hospitality businesses over the New Year's break (and blogged about by us on Jan 5) is, as predicted, being progressively rolled out across other types of business - all other types of business.

'Top Rated'

  Who wouldn't use the 'Top Rated' filter?

Introduced at the end of August, this enables Google users to get search results based on Google ratings - with Google returning only the businesses with the best Google scores in search.

Ratings in natural search

Do you want to look great in natural search? How about this...

  having a star rating in natural search helps your business stand out from the crowd

 The impact of these changes*

• no reviews - your business is filtered out of search
• less than 5 reviews - your business is filtered out of search
• a score less then 4.0 out of 5 - your business is filtered out of search
• a score of more than 4.0, but less than your competitors - your business is filtered out of search

And in addition to this: less than 50 Google reviews - the more sophisticated - some might say cynical - consumers might assume that you are either 'brand new at what you do', 'have only harnessed reviews from friends and family' or simply just don't get that consumers today 'rely on reviews to support their choices', even when prompted by personal recommendation.

*Google is rolling out these changes in a fairly ad-hoc way. Just because there's no filter in your local search - or not for your specific kind of business today - does not mean its not on its way.  It is, and Google will consider they have given you fair warning.


And what should you do? 

Get Google reviews? Whoa there! If you ask customers to post their reviews direct to Google, two things will happen:

• a proportion of them will post negative reviews (see note 1, below)
• you'll miss out on hosting verified reviews on your own site (note 2)

Get reviews to an independent site? Not any more (they are showing less and less in search by the day). It's your own site and Google that matter from now on. 

No - what you need to do is take a long hard look at your business's engagement with reviews - and the speed at which search is changing (and will continue to change) - and decide if professional review management is something you can continue to do without.

Note 1: in hospitality consumers have learned to accept the odd negative review. In most services though even a single well-drafted negative review can do untold harm. You owe it to your business to have some mechanism in place to enable it to manage inaccurate or misleading review pre-publication. It's one of the reasons why we always advise our new clients to invite reviews to their own websites before going on to invite them to Google 

Note 2: The consumer journey on the web is now well established: they first Google the business, service or product they want, once they have narrowed the field on Google they then visit the business's own website. Professional review management will always involve advice on the best ways to maximise the impact of independently verified reviews on your own website

HelpHound clients

 All HelpHound clients should aim to look like this - within eighteen months for a low-footfall business like estate agency, within six months for a high-footfall business like a restaurant, hotel or hairdresser - with at least double the number of reviews on the business's own website

Our clients have all the tools you need - and the reassurance that HelpHound will provide professional advice as and when you need it. They can also relax in the knowledge that HelpHound is keeping abreast of all the changes in the world of reviews on your behalf. If you are new to HelpHound and have yet to hit the magic '50' mark for your business on Google (that's per location) Karen and her team are here to help and support you.

Too posh to push?

Very occasionally we come across a business where we hear something like this:

"We don't feel that our [client/customer/parent/patient] will welcome the invitation."

Well, we have an answer for this, and it's quite simple:

"If you don't ask, your competitors will."

 Harrods - notoriously the 'posh people's store' - doesn't seem to have a problem engaging with its customers through reviews!

Two anecdotes

Here are two anecdotes that hopefully illustrate the point we are trying to make:

The 7* Mayfair Hotel*

Their social media manager told us that their customers would never write reviews because they never booked for themselves, their PA of their EA handled that sort of thing. On top of that every guest was checked out individually in-room, so any issues of a negative nature would be managed at that point.

A glance at TripAdvisor revealed that the hotel in question had received over 150 reviews in the previous 12 months (must be those PAs and EAs) of which 16% were one or two star. On Google there were over 60 reviews with a similar proportion of negatives, with the crucial 'room' category scoring under 4.

The hotel may have been too 'posh' to ask its guests to comment, but their guests - especially the less delighted ones - weren't too 'posh' to post reviews.

*OK, we know that strictly speaking there's no such thing, but some of the high-end establishments are starting to use this description when attempting to differentiate themselves from 'standard 5*'.

The West End estate agency

A great agency - with a great portfolio of landlords and tenants (always a great resource for reviews: landlords for quality, tenants for numbers) as well as the sales side. We are in a meeting with the lettings manager and she says "I don't know that my clients will welcome an email asking them for a review" when the owner of the agency, who has been working with us for some weeks, walks past and overhears her comment. He says...

"On the contrary, I was on the phone to a very wealthy client yesterday who said that he would have been positively offended if he had not been asked to write a review."

It's not who you ask but how you ask

We are not talking about one of those 'it will only take you 12 minutes to complete' surveys here (we are amazed businesses persist in using them; we know that marketing departments thrive on feedback and statistics, but asking customers to complete those surveys skews the results from outset).

What are we talking about?

A simple email or SMS with a link embedded:

'Dear Customer, Please tell us what you thought of [our service] by clicking here.'

Resist the temptation to dress the email up, it won't increase response. And definitely don't apologise for asking.

An estate agency in a pretty 'posh' part of London - before and after becoming a client, and learning how to 'push' with - and to - great effect, we are sure you will agree

What will increase response, without alienating or offending your customers?

• warning your customer that they will be asked 
• incentivising and rewarding your staff 
• making contact with your customer to reinforce the email

Try it. We guarantee you will be pleasantly surprised.

Finding a reliable Garage - 2016 style

Prompted by this in the Sunday Times, we examine how consumers behave, and how businesses should react, in 2016.  

  

This is 2014's solution: spend an age googling review sites until you find on that suits your current need, one for plumbers today, one for getting your car MOT'd tomorrow, a hairdresser the week after. 

 Relying on consumers to make the extra effort find to sites like these when they have Google reviews a click away is no solution for any business in 2016

Today's consumer expects (but does not always get - no fault of anyone but the businesses concerned) a simpler solution: and its called Google.

But do the businesses recognise this? We think the answer is currently "Not a lot" because, if they did, they would look a whole lot better in Google search:

MOT - independent - search 'MOT':

 London MOT centre shines in this search, mostly because the remaining five businesses have only three reviews between them. London MOT is only one negative review away from falling foul of the Google Filter. We're guessing most MOT specialists have a put-through of at least one customer per hour - that's 2500 potential reviews a year - they don't need a high percentage of their customers to write reviews

Service - brand specific:

 Truly shocking - these businesses are allowing their unhappy customers to dominate the impression given in search (unless they really are as bad as they look - which we seriously doubt). One click away - if anyone makes it past Battersea Volkswagen's 2.1 score - is this:

Unfortunately the impression given is just awful, and the responses are transmitting the message - unwittingly, we are sure - that: "We won't address your experience here, where all our future customers are looking" when we would advise our clients to address the issue raised in detail, head on. But that is coming from a business that lives and breathes review management 24 hours a day

Hairdresser:

 No reputation at all or "Let's let a tiny minority dictate what we look like to the world at large." Again - how many potential reviewers a day are being shown out of their salons without so much as a nod towards reviews?

Plumber:

 

Does 'My Plumber Man' know that just one more review will give them a Google score? Maybe with one of the four being like this they are hoping they will never get one:

The message - our message - is loud and clear. ENGAGE. 

But we do understand that it's a minefield out there. That's why HelpHound exists: to provide professional advice and navigate our clients through that minefield. So they look great where it matters most - on their own websites and on Google.

TripAdvisor - is their incentive a reaction to Google?

TripAdvisor are now offering your guests a £20 Amazon gift card if they write a review. 

Why?

As review managers our only loyalty is to our clients - who will ultimately be paying for this. We are inclined to think that this is a reaction to the increased traction Google are getting in the hotel reviews space.

So dominant in the world of hotel reviews for so long, TripAdvisor are becoming increasingly marginalised in almost all kinds of search for hotels and restaurants.

Google - on the other hand - have gained critical mass in terms of the numbers of reviews in popular centres and are making the most of their dominant position in search.

   Consumers have traditionally visited TripAdvisor to read reviews and see candid photos. With reviews and photos in numbers (which was not the case even a year ago)  - and a completely dominant position in search - many potential guests are satisfied with Google's offering now

Why?

Over the last year Google have massively refined their offering for those searching online for hotels. Adding features such as the Filter:

And 'Top Rated':

Our advice?

Consider very carefully where you would like your guests to be posting their reviews.  As Google becomes more sophisticated, so review management becomes an essential weapon in the professional hoteliers' armoury; helping you deflect negative reviews away from the public gaze and maximising positive comment on sites that matter.

HelpHound clients  

A HelpHound client should expect 25% more positive reviews on their agreed target sites (usually TripAdvisor and Google) and 75% less negatives across the board (on TripAdvisor, Google, Booking.com and all the OTAs that carry reviews).

As your professional review managers you have full-time access to a team that stays abreast of developments in the reviews space. If you are ever in doubt about strategy just speak to your HelpHound consultant.

It's all about visibility - no show = wasted effort

And not just effort - more importantly: opportunity.

This business has over 700 reviews on an independent review site...

...but this business...

 ...has none. Why? Because we advised them to concentrate on their own website (where they have over 1400 reviews - and rising. 463 for the branch below alone)...

...and on Google...

 ...where they have 282 - and rising.

We admit these figures are slightly misleading: mostly because the Greene & Co figures are for just one of their branches - but the others don't look too bad either...

...and they also look great on another site that people do visit, and trust...

 
Professional review management pays dividends - yet again.

For more on independent review sites read this.