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.

What does Google's AI - Gemini - say about review management?

We asked Gemini the kind of question any sensible business owner or CMO might reasonably ask as a first step (we have intentionally avoided asking a leading question, to the extent of referencing Trustpilot before HelpHound)...

 

In summary

As you might imagine, it was tempting, at least initially, to annotate each paragraph and fight HelpHound's corner in every instance. But the more times we read Gemini's conclusions, the more we were inclined to leave them to stand on their own merit. The last paragraph, 'Strategic Tip', pretty well sums it all up. In our opinion, at least.

Why not go through the same process and substitute the vertical your business operates in for 'Wealth Management'? When you see Gemini's answer, make a list of any other questions you have, and we will be delighted to give you our own - non-AI - answers.

And, by the way, the only comparator Gemini has so far failed to pick up is our fee scale and our money-back guarantee.

HelpHound - it's not 'either/or'

When a business first encounters HelpHound - through our website or this blog, or as a result of a recommendation from another of our clients, there can be an understandable preconception: that it is 'HelpHound's way or the highway'. Nothing could be further from the truth, and in this article we will set out the options for your business as well as dispelling any notion that HelpHound is a one-size-fits-all solution.

Your objectives are our objectives

What does your business aim to achieve with reviews, besides the universal objective of 'more enquiries/more conversions'? There is a very good reason that HelpHound does not offer an online signup: we need to know precisely what kind of review management will benefit your business best...

• Google reviews
• Moderated Google reviews 
• Reviews on an external website - Trustpilot, Feefo etc.
• A combination of two or more of the above
• Reviews showing on your website
• Reviews feeding through to your socials
• Reviews supporting PR, advertising and other marketing
• Ownership of your own reviews

We will also ensure, whatever solutions we recommend, that your business is in compliance with the law (enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK) and Google's own Terms of Service (applicable worldwide), the core rules of which are...

• no cherry-picking (if a business invites any reviews, it must allow all of its customers to write one)

• no gating (gating includes such tactics as sending out a questionnaire and then only asking those who respond positively to write a review)

An online reputation built on either of these is built on sand; and, furthermore, unnecessary. With moderation - reviews being checked for factual accuracy pre-publication - businesses can build rock-solid online reputations without flouting the law (our clients also tell us that it helps them sleep at night!).

Our No. 1 objective on behalf of all our clients is to ensure that the review management strategy we recommend is fully compliant with both UK law and Google's Terms of Service.

In the case of products, a review site's star rating can be a helpful marketing tool, but we might argue that 5 glowing gold stars from Google is an even more powerful - and credible - way to drive customers through your door

Next: where are your potential customers looking? If the answer is 'billboards' or 'on the London Underground', then a reviews site may be the right avenue (or at least part of the solution); if the answer is 'through a web search [of any kind]', then the answer will almost certainly be Google.

You can spot the HelpHound client easily, not just because they head up local search (having your own reviews provides a great SEO kicker) but because we ensure their own reviews are pulled through by Google - see the red arrow (no, they're the business's own reviews, not, as many are convinced, Google reviews or Google stars; just look at them on the business's website). Many clients say those stars pay for their HelpHound membership on their own!

Professional services need to look increasingly as near-perfect on Google as they can. Five years ago, scoring 4.5 out of 5 meant leading either their category and/or local search; today, that score needs to be at least 4.8 or 4.9, and maintained at that level. The only way of being sure of achieving that is...

• to be really good at what you do
• to have great CRM
• to employ a moderated review management system

The last of these - a moderated review management system - will help enormously where the first two are concerned: it will provide an ongoing stream of feedback to the business so improvements can be made and those, in turn, will result in improvements to customer relationship management.

Every client that has posted a review on the business's website is automatically asked to copy it to Google. Out of the 743 posted here over 500 have done so

So: speak to us - or contact us at info@helphound.com - and we will answer all your questions. 

Further reading

• Moderation - the key to successful review management

• Compliance - to be credible, reviews must be acquired in compliance with the law and Google's Terms of Service

• Google reviews - eliminating the risk

• Results - the clincher

• Our fees

HelpHound - our most important - and helpful - articles

There are now over 1100 articles here. We never delete one as we believe this adds to our credibility - readers can scroll back over ten years' of articles and see whether or not we got it right!

What were we definitely right about?

1.  The power of Google reviews: ten years ago there were Facebook reviews, and they had over 15% of the review market. Now only 1%. And the independent sites (you see them quoted everywhere), but all added together - Yelp, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, Feefo, Reviews.io and the rest - they now make up under 20%. Google dominates. Bizarrely, we now see large corporations adopting other review sites specifically to hide their negative reviews from the public view!

2. Compliance: nearly every business that did (and does) engage with Google reviews broke (and continues to break) the law - by selectively inviting only identifiably 'happy' customers to write reviews. We continually warn businesses that the CMA is on the case of this practice and, almost more importantly how powerful the knowledge of such misbehaviour was in the hands of competitors: 'Yes, we know they look great: of course they do, because they only invite happy customers to write reviews.' 

3. SEO: just about the only thing apart from a really well-designed and optimised website that will help a business rise in local search is a steady flow of its own reviews on its own website.

 

The Top 6

Anyone can search for a specific subject, be that 'education' or 'compliance' or 'how to...' by using the search option to the right >, but every so often we look back and choose half a dozen articles that really stand out as being more than usually helpful.

 

We have seen better and we have seen 'not quite so spectacular' - one thing we have never seen after a business has adopted moderated review management is a fall in inbound enquiries!

• First and foremost: 'Results' - no business embarks on review management unless it can see concrete financial benefits, over and above any alternative strategies. The warm fuzzy feeling of seeing a great review is simply not enough. See two clients' success stories featuring both the uplift in new business as well as the quality per individual piece of business and a consumer story showing how reviews reinforce their journey and choice in the article above. For examples of businesses that had next to no Google reviews on joining see their 'before and after' positions in this article.

• Going direct to Google. It is every business's first reaction: 'Let's get loads of great Google reviews.' and their second reaction? Only invite customers who are guaranteed to write a 5* review - understandable, until you realise it is also illegal. In order to have the best of both worlds - to be CMA compliant by allowing anyone who visits a business's website to write a review and still select those you actively invite your business needs a moderated review management system. This probably comes under the heading of 'boring but essential' but it definitely enables our clients to sleep at night. You wouldn't neglect to insure your business's premises or stock; look at moderation as your business reputation's insurance.

 

If your business provides a professional service in 2025 there's only one review solution - Google (combined with moderation - see above). 

• Independent review sites. You've had the sales call - they spend an awful lot of their resources on sales, unlike Google, which doesn't sell or directly monetise its review function at all (it is, of course, extremely grateful for the flow of valuable content). If you are considering one (or have bought one) - and you want potential customers to see your reviews rather than just having a headline score and reviews that are near to impossible to find in search, read the article linked to above.

• Sectors that should begin to take Google reviews seriously.  From wealth management to the law, from private medicine to private education, those in the professions and high-value services have been late to adopt reviews. For one very good reason: asking a customer, client or patient for their opinion of a sometimes extremely complex process is fraught with hazard. The solution is in combining a Google reviews strategy with independent moderation as described in the second paragraph above. On average about 7% of the reviews our clients receive contain errors of fact or statements with the potential to mislead the reader of their review. These are invariably reconciled before the review is ultimately published, on our client's own website or to Google, thanks to our moderation process.

 

• If you like an infographic you will welcome this article: it illustrates and explains the review process from beginning to end, although in reality there is no end, because reviews are now such a firmly embedded part of everyday interaction between consumer and business - they are here to stay.

• 10 things HelpHound will do for your business. Perhaps this should have been the first bullet point, but if you've read this far it will prove a valuable aide memoire and checklist. 

And finally...

The best thing your business can do is prove all the above for itself.  By adopting professional review management. Here are two more articles to round out the key information about HelpHound...

• Our fees and our guarantee