Ongoing review management - it is SO important

In your first weeks of operating Dialogue your business has gone from no reviews on its own website and no (or very few) reviews on Google to 'lots' on your own site and 'some' on Google. What happens now?

To get the right answer to that question it is important to understand how consumers use reviews. There has now been plenty of academic research in that field and all of it points to the following:

1. The pure number of reviews can either boost or dilute the impression you create online. Put simply: a business with 100 great reviews looks bigger and more successful than a business with 50 (and much more so than one with none). The message here is loud and clear: never take your foot off the throttle.
2. Recent reviews matter: If consumers see that the last review was written months ago that runs the risk pf creating the impression that it was written by the business's most recent customer. Then some will draw the conclusion that you are not a great force in your marketplace.
3. The content of reviews is important: it is used by Google to create the three 'rich snippets' shown in the Knowledge Panel (the box that pops up to the right in search containing all your business details - see illustrations below), so encouraging customers to make content detailed and relevant is a good idea. Simply explain how important this is to your business and your customers will respond with great content.

More detail:

Pure numbers

Remember that four reviews a month will add up to fifty by this time next year (and how many of your competitors have anything like that number)? Perseverance is the key here.

Recent reviews

If you build the fact that you will be inviting reviews into all your dealings with your customers they will be upset if you don't invite them, rather than the other way around! That's the way to keep your reviews fresh, as well as the numbers steadily growing.

Rich snippets*

Rich snippets are one of the most important aspects of the Google Knowledge Panel - there for all to see, every time you feature in search results. Negative rich snippets can do untold harm. Here's what one client's looked like when they joined at the end of last year:

And here's what they look like now (less than three months later):

And for anyone wondering about this business: they are a large well-established lettings agency with a very positive and proactive attitude to tenant relations. But with thousands of tenants it was all too easy for the disgruntled minority to dominate what was being said online, so the impression being given was heavily skewed towards that tiny (but vocal) minority's opinions. Dialogue has redressed the balance for them (and will continue to do so).

And one last thing...

There's much more to our role, but clients refer time-and-again to the 'discipline' element, by which they mean that Dialogue ensures that they are always up-to-date as far as reviews are concerned; that they are consistent in requesting (and therefore getting) great reviews, month in, month out.

*Rich snippets: Google software analyses the content of all your reviews, looking for the three predominating themes, it then chooses a phrase from a review that relates to those themes and displays all three as illustrated above.

Dialogue for the Professions - getting off to a great start

The professions (in this context: medicine, the law, financial management, estate agency and the like) come to Dialogue with one (small and eminently surmountable) disadvantage and one massive advantage, compared with, say, those in hospitality.

Whereas hotels and restaurants have numbers in their favour when looking for customers to write reviews (a hundred bed hotel is likely to host upwards of 15,000 guests a year) the professions have an asset that more than makes up for their lack: the customer (client) bond is profoundly greater, and this can be employed to great effect.

Your objective

Your aim will be to get as many great reviews to your website as you can, and get as many of those posted on to whichever external website matters the most (for the purposes of this article let's call that Google). 

To do this effectively you must make the most of this bond. You must optimise the ratio of clients who respond to your invitation to a) write their review to your website and b) go on to copy that review to Google.

Optimising response

In an ideal world every client would respond (to both the invitation to your site and to Google). But we all operate in the real business world, where time is at a premium and emails, despite best intentions, go unanswered.

So our advice to our new clients (born of over eight years' experience) is as follows:

1. Build the fact that you will be asking every client to write a review into every aspect of client contact. Mention it when you first meet ('We invite all our clients to write a review...') and clients will be actively expecting your email when the transaction is completed.
2. Make sure all client-facing staff reinforce the message. For instance, clients will often thank staff over the phone or by email, if staff are trained to say 'Oh, please do remember that when you are asked to write your review' the message hits home.
3. Don't just email (the invitation to write the review) and hope. Most important of all, follow up with a brief phone call.

The crucial phone call 

It takes less than a minute, and it should go something like this...

“Just calling to say that the review you’ve been asked to write is really important to us. Once you have posted your review you will be asked to copy it to Google, this helps us create local awareness, so I’d be really grateful."  

Everyone has their own words to communicate the same message: 'please don't ignore the emails'.

What we do know...

Is that if you do this, you will get reviews, great reviews to your website and great reviews to Google. 

And before you know it, the phone call will become second nature, part and parcel of your customer service regime. 

Click to enlarge or email karen.hutchings@helphound.com for your very own copy