There have been three important events in the last eighteen months regarding online reviews that every business should be aware of:
- The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 gave the CMA vastly increased powers to sanction businesses misusing online reviews
- The CMA has invested in AI software to speed up the identification of businesses likely to be in breach
- The CMA has begun taking action, initially regarding five businesses (one being a review site), where it considers there have been potential breaches
Below is a checklist, in the form of the five questions to which the answer will be a simple 'Yes' or 'No', so you can identify if your business is in breach, and therefore what action it needs to take, if any, to avoid sanction by the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA).
1. Does your business selectively invite customers to write reviews, either to a review site or to Google (or both)?2. Does your business employ any mechanism - a formal survey or a simple 'were you happy with our service?' type email to identify 'happy customers' before inviting them to write a review?
3. Does your business have control over the timing of reviews written by your customers?
4. Can your customers only write reviews of your business if specifically invited to do so?
5. Does your business use a review site - Trustpilot, Feefo etc. - to identify those customers most likely to leave a 5* review and then invite those, and only those, to post a review to Google?
If you cannot answer 'No' to all of the above five questions, your business is in breach of the CMA's core regulations*.
*We cannot, of course, make any promises as to any course of action the CMA is likely to take in any individual case, but logic indicates that businesses that have taken steps to correct breaches, or that were in breach in the past but are no longer, are unlikely to be the first targets for regulatory or legal action by the CMA.
What will the CMA do?
First: what it will not do: the CMA will not warn any business that it is about to become subject to either investigation or sanction; it will consider that its press releases over the years have provided sufficient warning.
Past history indicates that the CMA is highly unlikely to initiate action against a business and subsequently find it not at fault. The CMA will only initiate action where it considers that it has a watertight case.
CMA fines, even before the 2024 Act gave them the power to levy fines of up to 10% of a business's turnover, were never insignificant. The case of the four Bristol estate agents that were fined £370,000 for illegal price-fixing is instructive in this regard.
The 'we're too small/insignificant' argument that we have heard so often in the past ceases to hold water now that whistleblowers, combined with the CMA's own AI, make it economically viable for the CMA to sanction businesses regardless of size. From our discussions with the CMA, resources are a critical factor, and anything the CMA can do to bolster these or show HM Treasury that its ROI is providing a positive financial impact will undoubtedly be viewed positively.
Our advice?
It couldn't be simpler: comply with the CMA regulations. Now.
How?
We fully understand the reasons why businesses have cherry-picked (invited only customers they were certain would write a positive review) and/or gated (pre-qualified customers before inviting only those likely to leave a 5* review) in the past. Inviting 'everyone' was considered a risk too far. But the benefits of having a great score, especially a great score on Google, were just too obvious to ignore.
Unfortunately for such businesses, that option was never on the table: the CMA's regulations have expressly forbidden such a strategy for many years now. One can see the CMA's logic: how are consumers to trust a business if it is somehow able to filter reviews to ensure that only those that show the business in a positive light ever make it onto the web? On top of that, how are consumers to trust reviews as a whole?
This has, until now, given a great many businesses a stark choice: avoid engaging with reviews altogether or flout the CMA regulations. The first sacrifices far too many benefits (increased enquiry rates and lead flows, social proof and SEO, to name but a few). It also runs the increasing risk that a minority of disgruntled customers can 'capture' a business's online image.
The second of those is no longer viable, as we have explained above. The risk of sanction is now just too great (and the sanctions are far too severe to contemplate).
Achieved thanks to moderation - search 'estate agent Kingsbury' and see how this business shines in full compliance with the CMA regulations
That's where moderation - the act of employing an external moderator to ensure reviews are as accurate and reflective of the reviewer's experience of the business as possible*, comes in - it's an extra expense, admittedly, but one that will a) ensure compliance with the CMA regulations and b) protect your business from factually inaccurate, potentially misleading or just plain unfair reviews.
*Moderation relies on the cooperation of the reviewer. In our long experience, an average of 7 reviews in 100 require intervention of some kind by our moderators, to invite the reviewer to correct errors of fact or rewrite a potentially misleading comment. In only 3 cases in 100 where our reviewers become involved does the reviewer decline to do so. Put yourself in their position: who, knowing the business will post a response to their review, will persist in writing one that contains inaccuracies?
The 'Perfect Business' - does it need moderation?
We come across these less and less these days. Why? Not because businesses have become slacker, but because more and more consumers have come to understand the power a single well-crafted review has - especially if written on Google - to hurt such businesses.
We continue to encounter many businesses whose perfect Google score of 5.0 has been impacted by an inaccurate or misleading negative review. Some might reasonably say, 'But that's just one among dozens (hundreds even)', and they would be mathematically correct. But consumers have also learned how to read reviews: these days they will often select the 'lowest' button...
...and if the reviews they then read are credible, they will often move swiftly on to another similar business.
How do we know this? Because of the urgent calls we receive from businesses where a single negative review, often inaccurate and sometimes unfair in the extreme, has resulted in their inbound enquiry flow falling measurably. Retroactive review management - known as 'reputation management' in the trade - is far less effective than proactive moderated review management.
And Finally...
Even when businesses understand all of the above, they are left asking one crucial question: 'Does this mean we have to actively invite every single one of our customers/clients/patients to write a review?'
The answer is 'No'. The 'golden key' to review management is twofold: first, an intimate understanding of the CMA regulations and then this button, allowing anyone to review your business when on your website...
To see this working live - both the 'Write a review' process and the 'What is HelpHound?' explanation, click here
...the key word here is 'allow'. This makes your review management practice compliant. The CMA understands that there are circumstances where a business wouldn't want to proactively invite a customer to write a review, but they do require you to provide a mechanism to 'allow' them to do so. We probably don't need to repeat it, but all reviews written by people clicking that button are sent directly to pre-publication moderation. How much better than a factually inaccurate or misleading review on Google?
Further reading...
