Why bother to obey the law when it comes to reviews?

These are posts in an online forum from staff that claim they have been asked - and in some cases incentivised - to encourage a certain class of customers to post favourable reviews of a business, in this case an estate agency. Almost every activity mentioned in these posts, on the business's side and on that of the reviews site, if it were true, would be in breach of one or more of the CMA regulations.

You may - or you may not! - be surprised just how often we are asked this question. Even those of you that are surprised that the question is asked might be surprised if you knew which businesses are asking the question! In this article we will make the case for obeying the law, not because we believe that those currently breaking the law are about to have their collars felt (although that may well be the case - the CMA do not give specific warning of action, but they have been active in making noises about non-compliance where reviews are concerned for a while now) but because there are other implications other than being arrested and fined that flow from non-compliance.

First, let's recap on the main breaches we see:

1. Cherry-picking: the practice of only inviting reviews from satisfied customers. Illegal.
2. Gating: the practice of systematically identifying happy customers before the business invites them to write a review, often done by sending a customer survey to identify those most likely to write a five-star review. Illegal.

In the context of the rules, both of these are serious breaches - and therefore illegal. why? Because they are designed expressly to tilt the impression given to any potential customer in favour of the business. That's fine in the context of testimonials - because these, by their very nature, are understood to be selected positive comments. But with reviews - absolutely not. The rules are clear...

• if a business invites reviews at all, it must enable all of its customers to write a review
• the timing of such a review must not be controlled by the business, it must be at a time of the customer's own choosing

So - back to the question in the title of this article: why bother to obey the law? The simple answer would be to say 'for the same reason you obey any other law' but, at the moment we are hearing far too many businesses say 'but the law is not being enforced' and they are right. No business has - yet - been prosecuted for manipulating reviews, so back to the question. Here's our answer: 'because your competitors will use your non-compliance against you'.

How so? Nowadays not a day goes by when the press doesn't run an article about reviews being manipulated in some way, so consumers are aware that playing fast-and-lose with reviews happens. It only takes a nudge from business A to say 'do you know how business B has so many great reviews?' to sow the seeds of doubt in the mind of a savvy consumer.

An example

This innocuous little button is key to compliance for all HelpHound clients

We have a client in South London, an estate agent. They had two Google reviews when they joined HelpHound, they now have well over two hundred reviews on their own website and over a hundred on Google. They know...

• any of their customers, indeed anyone at all, can write a review to their website at a time of their - the customer's - own choosing. Why? Because there is a button on their website inviting them to do just that.
• everyone who has a review published on their website is invited to copy their review to Google, automatically
• they are, therefore: complaint with the CMA regulations

But their competitors? They mostly decided they could do without such complaince. They also started with a small handful of reviews (sometimes none), but - to remain competitive with our client - they decided to break the law. How? By cherry-picking or gating (see above), sometimes both. How do we know? Because, surprising as it may seem, staff move jobs, and when they do, they tell staff at their new employers just how their previous employer managed to look so good. And that information in the hands of a competitor? 

"Yes, Mr & Mrs X, ABC estates' reviews do look very good indeed (but are you aware that they only invite their happy customers to write reviews)?"

That simple sentence will be enough to unsettle most potential clients, especially when ABC estates' cannot positively demonstrate compliance.

The lesson to draw

Your business needs to be compliant, not simply to stay on the right side of the CMA but also to defend itself against this kind of perfectly valid attack on its probity.

Further reading...

• the CMA regulations - and our analysis of them

The future for reviews - could it be bleak?

Writing in yesterday's Times - referring to the Sri Lankan's government's blocking of social media (Facebook and WhatsApp) after the horrific Easter bombings - Lucy Fisher, the Times defence correspondent said...

'The radical move would once have been condemned by the international community as the heavy handed tactics of a dictatorship determined to shut down free speech. In the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings last month, however, resignation is growing that the American companies that own and run these content and messaging platforms cannot sufficiently police themselves and enforce their own rules on content.'

So what has this to do with reviews? Let us try and explain (and please do feel free to comment). Here are five statements that might well have seemed contentious even eighteen months ago, certainly we would not have blogged them back then, but here we are, doing exactly that...

1. The general public cannot trust reviews sites
2. The general public cannot trust Google reviews
3. Reviews can be bought or faked
4. Neither the reviews sites nor Google have mechanisms in place to ensure that the reviews they publish are genuine 
5. The regulators have done very little to address the situation

Let us examine each of these in more detail...

1. The general public cannot trust reviews sites

Pressure like this forces staff to get reviews from anywhere and everywhere they can (unless you believe this agent was completing in excess of ten sales a month!)

Reviews sites are paid for by businesses. This does not make them intrinsically unreliable, but it is interesting to talk to businesses that have used them. Invariably they make statements such as 'they allowed us to select who to invite and when to invite them' or 'they had a brilliant system that drove negative reviews straight to page two'. In addition to these very 'broad brush' complaints we have a detailed file on each of the major reviews sites going back over the years detailing patterns of review writing and suspect individual reviews.

2. The general public cannot trust Google reviews

Anyone with access to a computer can write a Google review. While the majority of Google reviews are undoubtedly genuine, we see evidence of businesses manipulating Google reviews every day (by cherry-picking, gating or simply asking 'friends, colleagues and family' to write reviews). This is not directly Google's fault, except that Google could, if it decided to do so, instigate procedures to identify and punish such reviews and practices. In Google's favour, they will, if presented with evidence, take action against firms that are gating (pre-qualifying reviewers).

3. Reviews can be bought and/or faked

You don't see advertisements like this on eBay (and many other sites) for no reason. These businesses have customers, and those customers are paying to have their Google (and other) scores inflated. Theses are just a selection from eBay today...

4. Neither the reviews sites nor Google have mechanisms in place to ensure that the reviews they publish are genuine 

Apart from Yelp's infamous 'filter' (that would appear to filter as many genuine reviews as it does fakes or malicious reviews) and Feefo's 'invitation only' system that relies on the business sending Feefo genuine customer email addresses, we see little effort by most reviews platforms to ensure the authenticity of their reviews or their reviewers, and few sanctions on businesses caught manipulating their systems. How many hotels have been 'red flagged'; by Tripadvisor? Ten? - in ten years? We could identify ten hotels in a single London postcode that regularly write negative reviews of their competitors.

5. The regulators have done little to address the situation

The CMA  - the UK government regulator directly responsible for consumer protection in the area of reviews has sanctioned one business since 2015. One. And here is the sanction...

And here is the full post on the CMA's website. Here are the CMA's regulations relating to reviews and our analysis of them. Here is our open letter to the CMA.

Why is this so important?

Because, increasingly, consumers base significant spending and investing decisions on reviews. Not just 'knitwear', but who to invest their life savings with, who to appoint to sell their house or who to entrust their healthcare with. Important, potentially life-changing, decisions.

It would easy for the government to simply say 'reviews cannot be trusted, they're banned'. But this would be to miss a wonderful opportunity to serve consumers' best interests.

Consumers' best interests

These are patently best served by having reviews that are genuine and therefore credible. There is an example for others to follow, and it's called HelpHound. At HelpHound we do everything short of forcing the system grind to a halt to ensure that our clients' potential customers are served genuine and credible reviews.

• every single review is read by one of our moderators. They are trained to know what to look for and, while a very clever person would undoubtedly sneak a five star review past them on the odd occasion, they would never get a negative through without challenge; the chances of such 'fake positives' making a meaningful difference to an established HelpHound client's score, on Google or on their own site, are so small as to be negligible

• reviews that contain assertions of fact or potentially misleading statements are always referred to both the reviewer and the business under review for clarification. This does not mean that negative comments are suppressed - far from it - just that those comments must be supported by the facts

• We have a 'two strikes rule' that all our business customers sign up to when they join. This means that they are allowed one 'mistake' - one review that our moderators decide was written by a connected person (it is invariably a 'keen', often young and inexperienced, junior member of staff). After that they are on a warning, with the ultimate sanction being termination of their contract. How often in the last five years have we had to issue such a warning? Never. Simply because our clients get just how crucial the credibility of their review is

• Overriding all the above is the core premise that, at the end of the day, the customer's right is to have their review, whatever it states, published on our client's site, and the automated invitation to copy that review to Google will follow as night follows day

So - if HelpHound can do it, why cannot others? That is a bit like asking 'why does Facebook allow live-streaming of mass murder?' - we don't know, we are not Facebook, but we do know what we would do if we were.

So come on government, come on the CMA, but most of all: come on UK Plc. Let's start giving consumers what they want. 

Genuine, reliable reviews of your businesses

Many ways to get great reviews to Google...

Above: The 'Holy Grail' of review management - a great Google score, a great score on the business's own website and stars in organic search, all achieved in compliance with the CMA regulations and Google's own T&Cs.

Over the years we have encountered just about every strategy known to man or woman to achieve one single objective: a great Google score. Here we list all that we can recall.

• Get happy customers to write a review to Google

• Get all customers to write a review to an independent reviews site, then invite only those that post a 5* review there to copy it to Google

• Use a system that allows the business to nominate those allowed to write a review

• Use a system that is closed to members of the public not specifically invited to post a review by the business

• use a system that allows the business to choose the timing of the invitation to write a review

• Get all customers to email you with a report of their experience with your business and then invite those that respond positively to write a review to Google

• Do the above, but then go the extra mile and set up a new Google account on behalf of the customer and then copy and paste their complimentary remarks there, adding a 5* rating

• Send an email to the customer telling them they will be rewarded with cash/Amazon vouchers/M&S vouchers if the post a 5* review

Not forgetting...

• Encouraging employees to leave a review

• Inviting friends and family to leave a review

• Inviting business connections to write a review

Let's examine them one by one...

• 'Happy' customers

Illegal - the CMA regulations specifically prohibit what they call cherry-picking. If you invite a single customer to post a review you must be able to demonstrate to the CMA that all your customers are invited - and no, saying 'anyone can write a review to Google at any time' will not wash.

• All customers invited to post to a reviews site and then those that score the business 5* asked to post to Google

Illegal - this is a practice known as 'gating' and it is self-evidently going to skew the impression any prospective customer is given when they look at the business's Google score and individual reviews.

• Only nominated customers allowed to write a review

Illegal - the CMA regulations state that all customers should be able to write a review

• Using a 'closed' system (often called 'invitation only')

Illegal - customers must be able write a review whenever the want

• Inviting the initial comment by email (or even verbally)

Illegal - gating again.

• Setting up a new Google account

Illegal - and, on top of that, strictly against Google's terms of service. 

• Incentivising customers 

Illegal - and against Google's terms of service.

• Employees

Just don't - no matter what.

• Friends and family

Not a problem, but they should declare their connection (and have first-hand experience of your service)

• Business connections

As for friends and family

Punishment

The CMA regulations have the force of law. If a business is found to be in breach then they may be liable to...

• an unlimited fine
• publicity
• being barred from acting as a director of a limited company in the UK

Google, on the other hand, will simply delete all of the business's reviews and flag all future reviews for special attention.

The overarching principle

The principle that the government, in the person of the Competition and Markets Authority, will apply in any investigation is as follows...

"Has any action or activity by the business engaged in the gathering of reviews the potential to mislead any consumer when reading the business's reviews and, furthermore, relying on those reviews when making a purchasing decision."

Put bluntly: Has the business done anything to make it look better than it otherwise would or should?

Further reading

• The CMA regulations - and an analysis

CMA compliance - just when we thought we had seen it all!

HelpHound has been at the forefront of review management for so long now, we thought we had seen every way in which a business might seek to 'game' the system (for 'game the system' read 'break the law', for that is exactly what they are doing).

Just to put everyone in the picture, and before we go on to describe this new shocker, let's catch up with the common compliance breaches every regular reader will be familiar with...

Cherry-picking

By far the most common transgression, almost every business we meet with is - or has been - guilty of this to some extent or another (that doesn't make it any more legitimate - or legal): it involves asking selected customers to post a review - and it's in contravention of the CMA core rules - if a business asks one customer to write a review, anywhere, it must enable all its customers to do so.

Gating

Gating takes many forms, but all have the same effect: they give consumers a skewed picture of the business. How? The business in question invites all its customers to write a review (so far so compliant) - which could be to their website or to a little-known (and little seen) reviews site - and then asks only those who write five star reviews to post them to a site that really matters - commonly Google. We probably don't need to tell you that this is contrary to CMA regulations - but we have several examples on file here at HelpHound.

The new kid on the block

This latest example has taken both the above and added a whole new layer of non-compliance. We have not given it a name because it so shockingly contravenes all regulations, Google T&Cs, the CMA rules and the common law that we don't want to trivialise it by doing so.

It involves doing all of the above and then posting the review to Google 'on behalf of the consumer' - by opening a new Google account in the customer's name and then posting the review that has been sent in by email or posted elsewhere. 


Further reading...

• The CMA regulations - and our explanation
• Cherry-picking - a full definition
• Review Gating - in the context of other rule breaches

2019 - the year the CMA finally clamps down on businesses that abuse reviews?

We sincerely hope so. Because if they do not a whole lot of consumers will be continue to be misled (and many honest businesses will miss out on custom). Let's look at the current situation...

Here's a checklist of the kind of abuses that we see committed by businesses every day...

Just one of dozens of such ads on Ebay - today - so there must be thousands of businesses out there cheating the system 

1. Only inviting happy customers to write reviews (called 'cherry-picking' by the regulators)
2. Only inviting customers to write a review at the time the business choses
3. Using a reviews site or mechanism that allows the business to challenge negative reviews
4. Posting fake reviews to reviews sites
5. Posting fake reviews to Google
6. Employing an outside agency to post favourable reviews of the business
7. Using reviews of one product to promote another - reviews of a vacuum cleaner to promote a bicycle, for example
8. Using reviews achieved in one market (e.g. USA) to promote the business in another market (e.g. the UK)
9. 'Gating' - getting legitimate reviews to one site and then inviting only those that rate the business 5 stars to post their review to another site
10. 'Secret gating' - inviting reviews to the business and then only inviting those that rate the business 5 stars to post to a reviews site or to Google
11. Getting employees (or their friends and family) to write reviews
12. Incentivising customers to write positive reviews (incentivising customers to write any kind of review is against Google T&Cs)

Wow! - that's a full dozen. How about what customers are looking for when they read reviews?...

1. Honesty
2. Transparency
3. Case histories that they can relate to
4. A regulated environment

So what can be done to pull the two together?

1. Regulatory action

Five years ago we would have put 'education' (of businesses) in front of regulatory action, but now, in 2019, we know that any business guilty of any of the breaches listed above above is performing that breach wilfully - they know they are breaking the law. They are cheating the system. Worse still, they are cheating consumers.

Excuses

Here are the main reasons we hear from businesses that are in breach...

• We didn't know [whatever non-compliant behaviour they had adopted - the most common is cherry-picking happy customers to write reviews] was against the CMA regulations
• We were told by [insert name of reviews site] that their system was compliant (using a closed system - where only those invited by the business to write a review can do so, or a system that allows the business to appeal against negative reviews, to cite just two examples)
• We had received unfair reviews from [ex-staff/competitors/customers with an axe to grind] and we needed to redress the situation urgently

...and none of them will be acceptable to the CMA. Remember that the CMA regulates your business's use of reviews - and the sanction, if your business is found to be in breach of the CMA regulations, will be on your business.

The solution

All businesses have the following two options...

It is possible to look great without cheating

1. Put a button on your website inviting all your customers - and anyone else - to write a review direct to Google (why on earth would a business want their reviews to appear anywhere else - except their own website - in 2019?) or...
2. Adopt professional review management and get moderated reviews to your own website and to Google

Further reading...

• For those that are still unfamiliar with the CMA regulations here they are, along with our analysis
• And for those who might be thinking that 'doing it right' may be expensive, just look at how much extra business this client did as soon as they adopted professional review management (speak to us for more case histories)
• Moderation is all about ensuring that reviews are accurate and appropriate - it ensures that factually inaccurate or potentially misleading (as well as fake or downright abusive) reviews are very unlikely to see the light of day

Selecting customers to write reviews - the less obvious consequence

Clients and regular readers will be all too aware that the UK government has rules regarding customer reviews. Clients need not concern themselves because they are already compliant - by having HelpHound's 'write a review' button on your websites. But those yet to join?

If your business - or any of your employees - are selecting customers to write reviews, anywhere, but especially to Google, you are not in compliance with the CMA regulations. Let's be clear about these; they are not, as we sometimes hear, 'guidelines', they are regulations with the force of law.

But there are other, perhaps more immediate, implications that can have serious repercussions for your business. Take the following real-life example...

Non-compliance in a competitive marketplace

Business A hires a member of staff from business B (a competitor). You know the kind of thing, it happens all the time. But in this instance the new member of staff comes with a nugget of information in addition to all the usual baggage. The conversation goes something like this...

Director of business 'A': 'How does business 'B' have so many great reviews and so few negatives with such a great Google score?'

New staff member: 'We were told to select customers who were most likely to write a five star review and then do whatever was needed to get the review written to Google'.

Director: 'Were you aware that the regulators don't allow that?

New staff: 'Yes - but we were in such a competitive market the directors insisted.'


Now we move on to Business A's next Monday morning briefing meeting; the usual things are discussed, but just before the meeting breaks up the director says...

'I would like to tell you all the reason Business B's reviews and scores look so good: they are cherry-picking.'

Staff member: 'What do you think we should do about that?'

Director: 'If a potential clients references Business A in conversation, and especially their great reviews and scores, you should point out to them the reason they look so good.'


We will leave readers to draw their own conclusions as to the reaction of any potential customer of a business when informed that the business in question is breaking the law (and in such a way as to wilfully mislead customers).

Meanwhile, for those new to the CMA regulations - here is the full text of their letter to businesses along with our point-by-point analysis.

Businesses should also be aware of the following - from Google's own T&Cs:

'Don’t discourage or prohibit negative reviews or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers.'