Joining Helphound - what happens next?

It's such an obvious question, but the answer - or 'answers' - often surprise people. First, let us look at the prime motivators for businesses to join:

1. They understand that reviews are important. That consumers - especially consumers of high-value services (financial, legal, medical and the like) - actively seek out credible reviews
2. They understand that scoring well and having critical mass in terms of the number of reviews on Google is the ultimate goal
3. They understand that legal compliance, in the context of the CMA regulations - once viewed as 'nice to have' - is now essential
4. They require their reviews to be moderated, to defend their businesses against factually inaccurate, potentially misleading or just plain 'unfair' reviews

Taken one at a time and expanded upon:

1.  The importance of reviews 

Statistics vary (don't they always?), but reliable sources all agree on one thing: consumers a) read reviews, and b) rely on them, especially when making important and potentially life-changing choices. Throughout this article, we will be referencing Google's AI (Gemini), simply because it performs an objective web search and includes links to follow* if you require more in-depth proof:

*to find and follow the links, simply repeat the search in the grey box at the head of each example.

Conclusion: reviews, especially Google reviews*, matter. All other factors being equal, the business with the higher Google score will attract more enquiries than businesses with lower scores and/or fewer reviews.

* Google hosts between 71 and 73 per cent of all business (as opposed to product) reviews; this compares with other sites as follows: 6 per cent for Yelp, 3 per cent for Facebook, and 3 per cent for Tripadvisor. The remaining 16 per cent is spread across hundreds of sites. Add to this the fact that Google reviews appear in every single search for a business name or category, and that, rightly, consumers attribute more credibility to Google reviews ('rightly' because Google knows the identities and search histories of all its review authors), then the core focus of any business's review management strategy must be Google reviews.

2.  Great Google scores (and number of reviews)

Conclusion: No real need to read past the first word: 'Yes'. We would also argue that for high-value service and professional businesses, the 'sweet spot' is higher. We aim to achieve a score of at least 4.8 for our clients, even if that means a complete audit and reassessment of their internal CRM. 

3.  Does the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK have teeth?

Conclusion: although we have always stressed the importance of compliance with the CMA regulations, up until this year, there was no concrete proof that the CMA was being proactive in enforcing its core regulations regarding reviews. All that changed with the passing of the Digital Marketing, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. This gave the CMA far wider powers of sanction against businesses where the following breaches were evident:

• Fake or otherwise fraudulent reviews (e.g. paying for positive reviews, encouraging staff or other connections to write reviews)

• Cherry-picking customers most likely to write a positive review, and then inviting only those to do so

• Gating (the practice of testing customer satisfaction - usually by a 'How did we do?' type of email or questionnaire - and then only inviting those who rate the business at 5* to write a review, to Google or anywhere else. There are even instances of businesses inviting reviews to a less visible reviews site and then inviting those who post a 5* review there to copy that review to Google

4.  Moderation: 

Few high-value or professional businesses are willing to expose themselves to unmoderated reviews. The reasons are obvious: they often provide complex services where outcomes are beyond the business's control (think legal, medical, or wealth management), making them vulnerable to factually incorrect or misleading reviews. There has to be a safety net. HelpHound's moderation is that safety net:

Conclusion: The above just about covers everything you need to know about how and why we moderate all our clients' reviews.

Now that we are all on the same page regarding the reasons for adopting professional review management, we can safely move on to the actual processes.

1.  The mechanics

Your web designers embed our software into your website (we will provide all they need), enabling your customers and other stakeholders to write a review directly to you:

The highlighted button above leads directly here:

This can be tailored to every business's brand image, and the questions (apart from 'overall opinion', which is mandatory) are likewise business-specific

The button has two effects: it ensures immediate compliance* with the CMA regulations - by ensuring that anyone can write a review of your business, and it is the key route to our moderation: every review written there will be read for factual accuracy or potentially misleading statements. An average of 7 in 100 reviews requires some interaction with the author of the review, sometimes on minor points of spelling and/or grammar and sometimes on more fundamental (and potentially harmful to the business) misconceptions. It may surprise some to know that in very few cases indeed does the reviewer not welcome our moderator's intervention. When one examines the reasoning, it is easy to understand: few people want to see their reviews publicly corrected (in the response by the business, on Google or elsewhere).

*Compliance does not exonerate a business from fault over past breaches, but our judgment is that the CMA is far more likely to initiate action against businesses that are currently non-compliant than against those guilty of historic breaches.

2. The invitation to your customer/patient/client, asking them to write their review

Again, there is no such thing as a 'standard' email template, but this will give you an idea of the kind of thing. Please note: We have well over a decade of experience with the response rates gained by varying email wording, so we strongly recommend using our recommended template, at least initially. 

That's it. It only remains for us to show you how to maximise review flow and show you a case history. The key to maximising review flow is to constantly 'warn' your customer just how much their review means to you, both personally and to your business, at every conceivable relevant touch point. A good example is when they pay you/your business/other members of staff a verbal compliment: just say, 'Please remember to say that when you come to write your review.'

As for a great case history: here's a business that started from as close to scratch as makes little difference:

And here it is today - on its own website:

In the crucial Google local search '[business type] in [location]':

Note: the number of reviews next to the five gold stars and the 4.9 rating - no, not Google reviews, the business's own reviews, pulled by the Google schema and shown in comparative searches

And the Google knowledge panel* (compare it with the one above):

*the Google Knowledge Panel: this is shown in every search on your business, and is the resource Google uses to access information about your business.

All the ingredients are in place:

• Great staff
• Great management
• Great processes
• The right reviews solution

 ...and the results are there for all to see.

One final, but no less important, note:

At HelpHound, like most modern businesses, we use software to enable us to deliver on our promise to clients, but our service doesn't end there. We pride ourselves on our personal contact with our clients and rarely does an hour go by without an inbound email or phone call asking us for specific advice, be that on drafting a response to a review, how to appeal a factually inaccurate review (on Google or anywhere else), or how to increase review flows; we are here to help, and to ensure that every single client of ours succeeds. 

The link above - 'our promise to clients' - shows exactly what your business can expect. Including guaranteed results. We look forward to being an integral part of your business's continued success.

Getting the reviews flowing

As you might expect, we have very wide experience of review flows, given different circumstances/business types and methods of approach. We will deal with all these and more in this article.

The process

This is the simplest part:

1. The business sends an email asking for the review
2. The review is posted to your website, having been moderated by HelpHound*
3. HelpHound sends an automatic email to the reviewer inviting them to copy their review to Google

If that is all the business does, they will see a response rate of +- 1.5 per cent.

Which may be fine for a business that completes many thousands of transactions a month (an online retailer, for example). Sell 500 shirts, get 7 reviews, sell 5,000 shirts, get 70 reviews:

All the reassurance a customer could ever need, right? Bearing in mind a large proportion will be repeat customers, and everyone knows how to return an unwanted purchase these days.

But what about high-value low-frequency services, the kind of business that HelpHound predominantly works for? Let's look a little closer at what we mean by 'high-value low-frequency'.

We mean the professional and other service businesses, from accountants to yacht brokers (we couldn't come up with one beginning with 'Z'), medical, legal and financial services. The kind you choose and hope to stay with for a lifetime, or the kind you need in an emergency, or once only (think 'estate agent'), but where the wrong choice will cost you dear, in more ways than one.

A medical practitioner, an accountant, a wealth manager or a solicitor may only have single figures of touch points - a 'touch point' being where it would be appropriate to ask for a review - per month. A single branch of an estate agency is unlikely to have dozens. 

So let us look at the aims, lessons, and strategies that will ensure your business succeeds.*

* 'Guaranteed success'? Absolutely. Read more about our guarantee and fee scales here.

Aims

• To turn your existing customers into your most valuable marketing advocates

• To achieve a score of 4.9 on your website and on Google

• To get high-quality reviews*

• To get a steady flow of fresh reviews

• To get 500+ reviews in both locations, then 1,000, and so on

*'High quality': we have tested every possible means of acquiring this kind of extremely valuable review (see above). The kind that can convince a potential customer to pick up the phone or visit a business's website all on its own. They typically contain details of the customer's requirement before contacting the reviewed business, and then more details on how the business fulfilled their requirements. Not just the 'great business' type of review elicited by text/SMS.

Lessons learned

• Do not use text/SMS to invite the review. You will get a lower response rate and will be sure to get far less detailed (and therefore less helpful) reviews. Always invite reviews by email 

• Do not ask for reviews to be completed in your place of work; firstly, it puts undue pressure on the customer, and secondly, Google have been known to arbitrarily delete all or some of the reviews for a business where it sees multiple reviews from the same IP address 

• The wording of the email inviting the review is critical. It must be tailored to every single business, and sometimes to every discrete service offered by that business. The focus of the email should be on the benefits the review will bring to future customers, not the business

• Invitations to write a review out of the blue (with no warning) achieve a far lower conversion rate, and are generally of a far lower quality as well. 'Warn' customers that they will be asked to write a review, and reinforce how helpful future customers will find their review, as often as possible. If a customer pays a verbal compliment, be sure to ask them to remember to include it when the time comes to write their review

• Set targets. Easily achievable at first, and then ramped up as staff become increasingly practised at achieving them. It should be eminently possible to achieve reviews on your own website from half of your customers, and half of them copied onwards to Google

• Appoint members of management and staff to drive your review management. Integrate it into everyone's daily routine

• Reward members of staff, by team or individually, for achieving target numbers of reviews. Consider rewarding staff for every review they achieve**

**Do not incentivise customers to write reviews. Ever. It is against many review sites' T&Cs and flies in the face of the spirit of the CMA's regulations. Providing incentives or rewards for writing positive reviews is illegal.

Strategy

This client had 3 Google reviews and none of their own when they joined. They have developed a strategy, in conjunction with HelpHound, that has produced the results you see here. Above is their website. Below is what they look like in the critical Google local search:

And here they are, leading organic search (all in a very competitive marketplace):

The red arrow is pointing at the score that Google has pulled from the business's own reviews, not their Google reviews. We thought this aspect of our service was a 'useful addition' to our core service until a Google update temporarily switched it off; the howls of anguish from clients who valued it as much as anything else we do for them echoed around the office. Luckily, it proved to be a very temporary glitch

We tailor a strategy for every single one of our clients (no one-size-fits-all at HelpHound), and we will liaise with your marketing and web team to dovetail your review feed with your overall brand and web design.

Longevity

We will ensure that the strategy we recommend endures. Review management is a long-term commitment bringing benefits all the way along the journey. But many of those benefits will be apparent from day 1. Full compliance with the CMA regulations from Day 1, reviews flowing from Month 1.

Here's a memo that clients of HelpHound will immediately recognise. It is now well over ten years since it was first issued, and guess what? It is as relevant today as it ever was.

Here's another - more recent - version of the invitation email*:

*We always recommend that new clients run with a version of this email - tailored, naturally, to their own particular business - for two reasons: firstly, because this email format has been tried and tested over the years, and secondly, so we can eliminate the email as a cause in the event of lower-than-expected response rates.

Important note:

The above email invites the review to the business's own website only. This allows HelpHound to moderate every review (an average of 7 in every 100 reviews will involve some intervention by our moderators), in order to allow the reviewer to correct factual inaccuracies or potentially misleading statements***. Only after the review is published on the business's website will the reviewer be asked, automatically, by HelpHound, to copy their review to Google. If you look carefully at the example of Winkworth above, you will see just how successfully we - 'we' meaning the management and staff of their office in conjunction with HelpHound's software and advice - have been in converting a very high proportion of the reviews written to their website into Google reviews. 760 reviews to their website, resulting in 570 Google reviews.

***The wording here is precise. Our moderation is not designed to deflect honestly held opinions; by law, a consumer must be allowed to publish whatever review he or she wants, but in our long experience, the vast majority welcome our service: few actually wish to see inaccurate or misleading comments under their name, and therefore welcome our service. The result? Accurate and helpful reviews. For all concerned.

When clients are established and confident with their procedures and our mechanism, we often recommend they convert to what we call a 'Multi' invitation: inviting reviews to both their own website and Google at the same time.