The issue with 'closed' review sites

Let us first describe exactly what we mean by a closed site, and why, initially at least, they seem like a great idea:  A closed review site is one where the public - customer, client or patient - can only write a review at the express invitation of the business.

What's not to like about that? Surely that means that all the reviews on whatever site - Feefo, Doctify and so on - must be from real people? 

The answer to the basic  - and fundamental - question is 'Yes', all the reviews will be from real customers/clients/patients. Now put yourself in the position of a dissatisfied customer of, let's see, a clothing manufacturer, a less-than-thrilled client of a wealth manager or an unhappy patient of a doctor.

In the first example - a classic Feefo situation...

No problem, no issues; customers are happy to leave any kind of review and any rating; the business can see which of its products are popular and which are causing problems. The business won't be harmed by the review (there are many more giving this particular product an overall rating of 4.8). It can respond to the customer, which aids customer retention.  An ideal solution for online retail.

The second, a financial adviser or wealth manager...

Five out of six sites we looked at asked multiple questions before arriving at a similar page to the one above. This one references Trustpilot, where it has accumulated a grand total of 65 reviews over the past 12 years, many of which are for individual advisers, not for the service provided by the aggregator/lead generation site. Reviews on Google? Precisely zero.

There are closed review sites, and then there are closed financial services review sites. There is only one dedicated FS review site in the UK that we can find that will allow you to read reviews of a financial adviser or wealth manager without providing them with your personal details. And when we say 'personal details', we mean not just your email address, your physical address and your phone number(s), but the amount of money you have currently invested, the whereabouts of those investments and the amount of cash you have in the bank. All before they will provide you with any details of a financial adviser whatsoever, let alone any reviews. This kind of site is known, in polite circles, as a lead-generation site. Less politely? A 'squeeze site' (also 'squeeze page' because it /they are designed with the sole intention of extracting -'squeezing' - the maximum amount of information about an individual which they then effectively sell on as a lead). 

The one exception: VouchedFor, a division of Defaqto. Whilst allowing you to see rated advisers, you quickly realise that the advisers all score 5.0 or 4.9 and that VouchedFor has a great mechanism for ensuring they are kept 'hooked' by revealing the number of recent reviews posted - let's face it, you're not going to contact an adviser that hasn't received a review in the last 12 months, are you?

The third, doctors and other medical professionals

Sites such as Doctify will allow you to search for a doctor or other medical specialist, but what do you see when you do so?

Notice any common denominator? How about the great scores? Again. Now, there is one obvious reason for those close to perfect scores: that doctors are highly trained and dedicated people, by their very nature. But many are far from perfect, at least in the view of some of their patients, as even a cursory Google search will reveal.

There is another reason for those near perfect scores: given that the doctor or other medical professional has to initiate the review in the first place, suppose you are not 100% thrilled with your treatment so far, but have no other option but to continue with that person, are you about to write a less-than-glowing review when invited to do so by the practice using a mechanism that will precisely identify you and that they are paying for? 

One might even ask, 'Why bother to consult a review site at all, if every individual or business listed on there is as near to perfect as makes no difference?'

Examples of deflection: both patients and doctors comment on another 'open' site, in this case Trustpilot. 59 of 461 reviews of Doctify hosted there rate it at 1*. Of the remaining 400 reviews, almost all are of a medical practice/practitioner; in other words, they have been posted on the wrong listing (we see this all the time with Trustpilot; surely it would be simple to identify these at the time of posting and redirect the reviewer?). One wonders why a business such as Doctify would not ask Trustpilot to delete these, until one realises that they are the main prop maintaining the business's score at 4.5?!

What happens when a patient wants to comment, but doesn't want their medical professional to see/link them to the comment? They are driven to Google or Trustpilot (something which we named 'Deflection' many years back), open sites that will accept their review, without that review having to be initiated by the business. 

Let us not ignore the legal profession

10,000 - impressive? Not really; there are nearly 216,000 registered solicitors in the UK, with over 177,000 of those in England and Wales alone

One last point

As we can see from the above, unlike Google, which lists just about every single business on the planet, they only list paying businesses and individuals. We checked our local central London GP practice on Doctify; they have five full-time doctors, none of whom are listed.

In conclusion

We will say it again: if the business you are using prefers a review site, of whatever kind, to Google reviews, it is a red flag. It doesn't necessarily indicate that they are a bad business or that they are manipulating reviews, but it does raise the question, 'Why not Google?' 

HelpHound - the COMPREHENSIVE solution to reviews for ALL businesses

Regular readers will have seen all the Google AI scrapes posted here in recent months. One theme has been consistent: the comparison of HelpHound with Trustpilot. Here's a typical example...

Not 100% accurate - our reviews are incorporated into your Google listing, not under (or not at all):

Our client leading local search (in a very crowded marketplace) with their stars and rating highlighted (arrow); see Trustpilot anywhere? Quite.  And we should be quite clear: we moderate every single review, but we will only intervene if a review contains factual inaccuracies or has the potential to mislead a future reader, we do not - and cannot, by UK law - intervene simply because the reviewer is 'unhappy'.

And so far, so good. We are delighted to be singled out as the best review management option for high-value professional businesses, because that's exactly what we developed HelpHound to be (not, as some other solutions - no names - as a way of confecting a score of 4.5 to be used in marketing).

But here's the thing: a business doesn't have to choose between HelpHound and the review sites, be that Trustpilot or one of the myriad out there - Feefo, reviews.io, Yelp, Tripadvisor, or one of the industry-specific sites (Trusted Trader and so on) - if we (and our client) decide that they need a profile on one of those sites, then we will manage that as well. 

We have a high-profile client that looked great on Google and on its own site, but noticed that Trustpilot was attracting reviews from those that had - often unfounded or the result of misunderstanding - negative opinions. This was driving the business's score down to a point where competitors were able to weaponise it against the business in question. Unfairly. Funnily enough, the business also had an inbound sales call from Trustpilot offering 'help' too.

What did we do, together?

First, we pointed out the following:

1. The business's Trustscore (Trustpilot's name for the rating) could be improved without having to pay Trustpilot
2. That the business owned their own reviews, and could do whatever they liked with them, and that included asking their customers to copy them across to Trustpilot
3. That their Google score was of paramount importance, notwithstanding Trustpilot's pitch as to visibility in search. Google's own reviews always take pole position in search and Google is the search engine of choice for well over 90 per cent of the UK population, and it commands 98 per cent of UK mobile search

Second, we implemented - jointly - the following strategy:

• We first set up a test: we asked a percentage of customers who had written a review to the business's own site to copy it to Trustpilot
• We measured response, and then we calculated the number of positive reviews that would be needed to restore the business's Trustscore to good health
• We switched the repost request away from Google to Trustpilot for a percentage of customers for a period of weeks

Result?

The business's score on Trustpilot restored to well above 4 ('Great' in Trustpilot terminology). All for no extra cost. Diary note to repeat the procedure at intervals in the future.

So, our objective on behalf of all our clients:

First...

...to enable them to safely - and compliantly - invite reviews to display on their own website and use in their own marketing

Second...

...to get as many of those reviews as possible across to Google, to ensure a really impressive presence in competitive searches there

Third, and it is a distant third if we are honest...

...to look good on the review sites that matter to our client without incurring any extra costs

One more important consideration

Both Google and HelpHound are designed to host reviews and score a business per location. If a business has multiple locations, it is essential that the consumer can discover how the customers of that specific location feel about the service they were provided, and the service they can expect. Trustpilot charges significant fees for multiple listings, which is why it is so rare to see individual branch/office/outlet scores hosted there.

Conclusion

So, we repeat the title of this article: HelpHound works for all kinds of businesses, and it works more effectively and more comprehensively than any other review solution. Think of us as a review broker, in the sense that wherever your business needs reviews, now and in the future (remember Qype or Ciao, anyone?), we will enable you to get them there. If that means to Trustpilot, fine; if that means on Yelp!, so be it. But, just for the foreseeable future, at least, we will almost certainly continue to focus on enabling our clients to positively glow on Google, and in the relevant Google searches.

Trustpilot - the saga continues

One word one could use to describe Trustpilot is enigmatic. We looked up the dictionary definition just to be sure...

...at least when compared with Google. Let's mine down a bit deeper. This Weekend's Sunday Times ran an advertisement for HSBC personal banking. Here it is...

Sharp eyes will spot the strapline 'Excellent' and HSBC's Trustpilot score - the highly valued 'social proof'. Which chimes with HSBC's score on the Trustpilot website...

So far, so straightforward. But less so when we drill down into the underlying reviews...

How does Trustpilot come to '4.5' and 'Excellent' from those numbers? As a benchmark, the same numbers would yield a score of 3.2 on Google (and on HelpHound, as it happens). And do bear in mind that the headline score is effectively out of 4, not 5, as anyone writing a review, on whatever platform, is bound to score a business at 1* as an absolute minimum. Giving a score of 2.2 out of 4. Excellent? We will let you be the judge.

There are some clues on different pages on Trustpilot as to why HSBC's score is higher: for example, more weight appears to be given to reviews which are 'most relevant'; 'easier to read'; 'detailed' and 'reflect the TrustScore'. But nothing we can find anywhere on its site explains any of that.

'Summaries are created with AI based on a company’s most relevant reviews–which are up to a year old, detailed, easier to read, and reflect the TrustScore.' Again: no explanation (none that makes sense, anyway), but the phrase 'year old' may give us a clue. Is Trustpilot not counting reviews over a year old (for paying businesses)? If it were, it would run contrary to the policies at Google and other respected review sites (TripAdvisor, for example, requires proof of a complete change of ownership and business structure before it will even consider archiving reviews of a hotel).

Trustpilot also implies that extra weight is given to a business asking for reviews and, possibly (but not explicitly), responding - we assume it describes that as 'engaging'. 

Most intriguing of all is the 'reflect the TrustScore' weighting, which perhaps gives a higher weighting to those ('recent', 'relevant') reviews which are around the 4.5 score. We don't wish to be overly cynical, but a dispassionate observer might say that 'join us, and your 'weighted score' will now 'reflect the reviews written by more recent customers' might be considered a pretty powerful sales tool in the hands of less than scrupulous salespeople.

It would be too easy for a critic, and Trustpilot really does have its critics, whether on its own website...

60,870 one-star reviews!

...on Google...

...on other review sites...

...or on other media/forums...

Link

...or amongst the investment community...

Full report here

...to accuse Trustpilot of being far too opaque and open to manipulation* for a business whose core stock in trade should surely be 'trust'.

*'open to manipulation': proof is hard to come by, until you read the content of individual reviews - on or about Trustpilot - it is at this point that it becomes abundantly clear that some businesses are defying the spirit of the CMA regulations (if not the precise wording) in order to boost their scores or devalue the scores of their competitors.

We'll keep you posted, if and when we can clarify any of the above.

And finally - a question for HSBC

Why, when looking for a reviews solution, when your branches - given the first action a sensible person might reasonably be expected to do having seen that full page advertisement in the Sunday Times would be to google their local branch - would your marketing department not search out a solution that would address these awful (and some might say 'unfairly awful') Google review scores?

Just search on any of these branches - e.g. 'HSBC Camden Town' and see what your search returns. We'll save you the trouble...

Where's Willy? We mean 'Trustpilot', of course. Even Yelp, whose UK sales operation vanished back to the US years ago, managed to scrape in!

...Google score and reviews are prominent in every search. And reviews of each branch. A cynic might say, 'Why pay Trustpilot when Google reviews are free?' The same person might also say, 'Why pay Trustpilot when their reviews don't even feature on page one of Google search?' Unless, that is, you just want those four and a half stars to use in your marketing with the minimum of risk that anyone might actually access and then read the underlying reviews. As we say 'a cynic'.

Further reading...

• Report highlights flaws in Trustpilot's business model

• Let's clean up the world of online reviews

• Trustpilot - fast becoming the five-star 'go to' review site for big brands

• Which? highlights concerns 

• A business's detailed experience with Trustpilot

• A Reddit thread with some interesting nuggets in amongst the expletives!

HelpHound or Trustpilot? Your questions answered

The starting point for this article is important; online reviews can make or break a business. So let's first define that starting point. It is easiest done by listing all a business's objectives when moving from passive to active review management ('passive' being just as it says, waiting for reviews to appear on whatever platform and then - perhaps - reacting to them). 

Objectives with active review management

1.  To encourage customers to post their opinions where they will be seen by the most potential customers

2.  To ensure that those opinions reflect the reality of the business as closely as possible

3.  To ensure the absolute minimum of factually inaccurate or potentially misleading reviews are written, anywhere

4.  To comply with the law, in whatever jurisdiction(s) the business trades

By now, some will be thinking, 'Can we add the following?':

5.  Prevent negative reviews from appearing anywhere

6.  Especially on Google

And finally...

7.  To have a solution that serves both business and consumer in the long term 

So now let's see the difference between Trustpilot and HelpHound, taking each point above in turn...

1.  Visibility

Trustpilot                                                          

Trustpilot is a strange animal when it comes to visibility. Most - all? - businesses want their reviews to be seen by the most potential customers, but for searches on a specific business - 'ABC estate agents' or a generic class of business '[best] estate agent [near me], the two most popular searches on Google, Trustpilot rarely features, and Google invariably does. 

A review site that doesn't feature in most searches? How does that help either businesses or consumers? Our client, by the way, is the business leading both map and local search, and the only one showing the rating from its own reviews - not Google's - in organic search.

In addition, if a consumer searching for a type of business in their area were to visit Trustpilot and search, often the results are unhelpful in the extreme. Here is a search for 'accountant in Exeter' (Google lists over seventy)...

 

HelpHound

Our objective, on behalf of all our clients, is to have them show as they deserve in the important searches. Here is an example of one in the crucial generic, or 'map' search ['business type'] in ['location']...

The overwhelming majority of those 570 Google reviews of Winkworth in Kingsbury have been subject to HelpHound's moderation, which is specifically designed to eliminate, as far as is possible, factually inaccurate or potentially misleading reviews or review content before publication. Long-term statistics prove that this is effective in over 97 per cent of cases.

...and in organic search...

This is perhaps the most important screenshot in this article: hosting your own reviews - those 761 reviews indicated by the red arrow, gathered with and moderated by HelpHound - gives a really great SEO boost and provides wonderful social proof. It also enables the business to feed moderated reviews onwards to Google, with a significant proportion of the 761 reviews you see here finding their way to Google (almost all the 570 shown in the previous screenshot).  Our client would be the first to confirm that their score would be at least a couple of points lower in each location in the absence of HelpHound's moderation. And we know just how much our clients value the 5 gold stars highlighting their businesses in competitive searches. How? Because occasionally Google turn them off by mistake, and when they do, our clients invariably call us within minutes!

2.  Opinions reflect reality

Trustpilot

The most recent review of Trustpilot, on Trustpilot. 14 per cent of all reviews on its own platform rate Trustpilot at one star. That's nearly 60,000 1* reviews. Many are similar in tone and content to the one above.

So many Trustpilot reviews contain little or no information that is helpful to a prospective customer. We have pondered this long and hard, and the only conclusion we can come to is that Trustpilot's paying business members use push text to invite reviews; we know that this reduces word count and quality dramatically from when we conducted a live test for a client some years ago

Even the most cursory of web searches reveals that Trustpilot receives considerable criticism for aspects of its operation that hinder genuine opinions from being posted. One can see the logic of a system that seeks to verify reviews and reviewers, after all, inaccurate negative reviews unfairly harm businesses, but Trustpilot's mechanism manifestly works against consumers (especially those reluctant to divulge their true identity to the business under review**) and, importantly, in almost certain contravention of the UK CMA's regulations (see below). Again and again, even on their own platform, we see consumers complaining that their reviews are not published. 

**At first, this - insisting the customer use their real identity - looks like a good idea; only experience proves that such a strategy drives reviewers, especially those intent on posting a negative review, however misguided, straight to a place where their review will be accepted under a pseudonym. And that place? Invariably Google.

It also has an unintended but highly negative consequence for Trustpilot's paying business customers: suppose you are motivated to write a negative review of a business (and, believe us, there is no more motivated reviewer than one that wants to write a negative review!), but you are prevented from doing so by the platform, in this case, Trustpilot? A win for the business, some might think. But in reality, quite the opposite: these days, most consumers know that they can write whatever review they like on Google, so a significant proportion of those prevented from writing their honestly held opinion on Trustpilot will go on to do exactly that, where it will be far more visible (as well as, we suggest, credible). 

HelpHound

Reviews written on a HelpHound client's website. Detailed and therefore helpful.

And copied to Google...

Every review written through HelpHound is moderated; read by a human being, not machine-read or read by AI. This ensures that no misleading or factually inaccurate reviews are published. Unless the reviewer decides. And that last phrase is key: it keeps the decision firmly in the hands of the consumer - and therefore compliant with CMA regulations. This does not mean that reviewers publish reviews that contain factual inaccuracies or misleading statements, far from it. Just read any HelpHound reviews and you will notice three things: that the English used is well above average for the web (our moderators correct spelling and grammar); that they are more detailed than the average (the way we suggest our clients invite reviews leads to that) and, if critical, they are far more constructive than most negative reviews on other platforms. 

3.  Minimising factually inaccurate or misleading reviews

Trustpilot

Quantity over quality. For years, the stock markets valued review platforms on the basis of the number of reviews they hosted. So those platforms targeted volume. But consumers have wearied of reading valueless reviews such as those shown above, written by messrs Patil, Butler and King and their ilk. This may go some way to explaining the poor performance of quoted review sites' shares recently...

HelpHound

Moderation. Again. It is the only way. Consistently accurate reviews serve everyone: the company, its customers and its future customers. We are proud that, however far back you go, you will find all our clients' reviews have the following in common...

• they are overwhelmingly accurate in their depiction of the standard of service the reviewer received from our client's business 
• they are longer and more detailed than the average online review, and thus more helpful for future customers
• they contain few errors - either grammatical or spelling

 

4.  Compliance

Trustpilot

There's far more to compliance than simply complying with the CMA regulations. The reason the regulations are there in the first place is to protect consumers, but they are also there so that businesses that don't flout them can mobilise online reviews to drive their businesses.

There are currently far too many businesses - some large nationals and multinationals - who would appear to have bought Trustpilot on the basis that they would be able to challenge - successfully - negative reviews. 

Why, one might well ask, does this company, like so many, reference its Trustpilot score in its advertising? Perhaps a look at Google will provide the answer?

This is a case where a compliant solution - inviting all one's customers to write a review to the most visible site on the entire planet would have been the best advice. But then Google won't allow businesses to 'flag' reviews...

It is easy to see what has happened - sixteen out of nineteen reviewers (all writers of negative reviews) 'didn't respond to Trustpilot's request to resolve the breach of Trustpilot's guidelines'. That sounds very official, doesn't it? In practice, what has happened is that the business has asked Trustpilot to ask the reviewer to provide documentary evidence to support their review. And the reviewer has declined to do so. 

This is where Trustpilot comes very close to breaching the CMA regulations, by denying the consumer the right to have their genuinely held opinion published 'unless they provide documentary evidence'. Think of the situation the reviewer is in: they wish to post a critical review of their financial adviser or their medical practitioner, are they likely to want to have their personal details divulged to a third party for onward transmission to the business under review?

Bear with us now. Read this recent review of Trustpilot on Trustpilot:

If this were an outlier, we might take little notice. But look at all of these...

...and then consider the fact that they were all written in the last week. And not a single one has elicited a response from Trustpilot.

HelpHound

We have consistently maintained that the only way to engage with reviews and comply with the CMA regulations is to have those reviews moderated. Any system that demonstrably deflects negative reviews simply because of their rating must, by definition, be against the spirit, if not the substance, of the law.

Everything we do complies with the CMA's regulations, and not just because we want to comply with them, but because we believe that compliance adds massively to the credibility of our review management service and online reviews in general.

5.  and 6. Preventing reviews from appearing anywhere, and especially on Google

Trustpilot

Somewhat bizarrely, focusing on Trustpilot has enabled many businesses to deflect negative reviews away from Google. But that is to use reviews for an entirely wrong purpose. Reviews exist to help consumers choose the right business - sometimes a business that can have a life-changing impact (think medical, legal, financial and similar). They don't exist for businesses to manipulate them, and, as a direct result, those who rely on them. The first question any business should be asking itself is 'Why are we not concentrating on looking great on Google?' and there is only one answer to that question, which is 'We should be doing exactly that.' Why pay a review site when Google reviews are more visible, more credible and, added to those two clinchers, free?

HelpHound

By now, we are all agreed that having a great score and a great review presence overall on Google is the number one aim of any review management strategy. So how does HelpHound prevent negative reviews from appearing anywhere, especially on Google? By enabling the business to invite all of its customers to write a review on the business's own website and then to Google (the latter is by automatic invitation by HelpHound). And then moderating them fairly and professionally. Look at this business...

A score of 4.9 from 571 reviews is impressive in its own right. But we all know estate agents. How come they have just seven 1* reviews? With all the misunderstandings that can arise, whether buying or selling, letting or renting (and we all know moving house is one of the most stressful experiences one can have). The answer becomes apparent when we read the business's responses to the least flattering reviews: in a tiny minority of cases, they put their hands up and simply apologise, but in most instances the reviewer would have benefited from moderation; there has been a completely understandable misunderstanding that would have been resolved if the reviewer had taken the opportunity to write their review through HelpHound rather than direct to Google, as the overwhelming majority have been encouraged to do by this client. A considerable bonus of this system is the fact that it also, in the majority of cases, prevents an irrevocable split between the business and its customer. 

7. Long-term success

Naturally enough, when businesses first embark on active review management, they focus on 'putting their house in order' as soon as they feasibly can. But the wrong short-term choice(s) can severely impact - even put off - long-term success.

Trustpilot

The central issue with Trustpilot is exactly the same as inviting customers to write reviews directly to Google: it is impossible to eliminate inaccurate and potentially misleading reviews 'after the fact'; once that kind of review has been posted, it will, with vanishingly few exceptions, remain on the site. Even if the business can answer whatever criticism the reviewer has made, however erroneously, the review's score will remain to impact the business's overall score. In addition, there are severe compliance implications, because businesses or their staff will often succumb the - illegal - temptation to cherry-pick happy customers to invite to write reviews*. Besides opening the business up to regulatory action, such activity is very easy for competitors to identify and mobilise.

HelpHound

Moderation - again. There are two reasons why all our clients' businesses are so accurately reflected in their reviews - on their own websites and on Google. The first is that they are invariably great businesses (badly run businesses tend to adopt one of two approaches to online reviews: they either bury their heads in the sand and ignore reviews or they cheat - we use that word advisedly - to look good).

Surely a business in this sector must understand that potential and existing clients would appreciate a more proactive approach to Google reviews? Even a response to this review, which Google considers the 'most relevant', must surely be better than silence?

And finally...

At HelpHound, we make no bones about being a commercial entity. Still, we fervently believe the best way to drive our business is by being completely honest and transparent in what we, and our clients, do regarding our and their reviews. Great review management not only reflects well on the business concerned, but it also imposes discipline on each and every member of management and staff as well. We know of no client of ours that is not more efficient and effective as a direct result of adopting professional review management.

If you are still thinking, 'Why not simply substitute Google for Trustpilot?' then ask an additional question, such as 'Why did we not do that before?' The answer to that question would almost certainly be along the lines of 'If we had done that, then we would inevitably get the kind of inaccurate/misleading/plain unfair reviews that HelpHound's moderation is specifically designed to enable our customers and us to manage between us before any kind of review is posted.' 

Further Reading

• Moderation - a full explanation

• *Compliance - the CMA regulations and how to comply

• CMA to use AI to identify businesses flouting their rules regarding reviews

• Reviews for sensitive and complex businesses - essential reading for those in the financial, medical and legal spheres

• What price great review management? Full fee scales here

• Our guarantee of success