Light relief - you know your business has made it when...

...Clif Dickens parodies your brand.

Here's his take on Yelp...

 

And one or two of our favourites... 

The 180 degree test - one of the easiest ways to decide if Dialogue is right for your business

Turning questions around (or even on their head) often works for us, so here we go with Dialogue for you, just try asking the following questions on behalf of your business...

• Will we get less business by showing credible reviews on our website?
• Will we get less enquiries by displaying verified customer opinions of our service?
• Will we drive custom away by showing reviews to potential customers?
• Are unverified testimonials as powerful as verified reviews?
• Are our potential customers more interested in what we have to say about our business than what our existing customers have to say?
• Should we be forcing our potential customers to look away from our own website to find credible opinions about our business?
• Should we be ignoring *Google Places' potential to drive business our way?
• Should we be running the risk that disgruntled customers will post reviews on *Google?

And ultimately...

• If Dialogue has the potential to drive even one more customer a week/month (or even year, as will be the case with high value businesses like estate agency) through our doors, or enable us to charge £x more for our product or service, shouldn't we be trialling it?

*or TripAdvisor, or Yelp, or AllAgents, or whatever review site will most influence your potential customers (but please read this first).

Who would run a restaurant?

Here's another TripAdvisor Horror Story. This time it's focused on restaurants and pubs, but every hospitality professional will recognise the issues.

We heartily recommend you spend the time to read the article and look at the Double Barrel's responses on TripAdvisor. 

We don't intend to make any judgements about the rights and wrongs of the individual reviews here, but would just like to highlight some of the comments from the restaurateurs quoted in the piece...

Craig Smith is, of course, absolutely correct; a single bad review can severely impact on your business (over and above its impact on your ranking), and not just at the time it is written but for months and years to come. Many commentators and TripAdvisor fans make the point that they can 'see through the occasional negative'. They should speak to businesses that have to deal with the impact of those self-same 'occasional negatives'. No negative, however well responded to, ever becomes a positive for the business.

We meet this every working day of our lives. Dedicated staff are hurt by unfair reviews, and if they are not perhaps it is time to consider a career change? Why does TripAdvisor persist in allowing demonstrably incorrect and unfair reviews stand? We have blogged on this subject more than once; the answer, we are afraid is financial: TripAdvisor's share price performance is directly related to the number of reviews it hosts, so it doesn't do anything to impact that number.

 

Not a single hotelier, the CEO of the BHA

Every time we attend a conference where TripAdvisor are speaking hoteliers raise this question. Don't look to TripAdvisor for a solution: here's ours for hotels, we suggest that where it has become a problem for restaurants a similar note is added to the bottom of the menu (customers will respond positively).

Here's his review of the Old Crown:

There are a couple of interesting points to make here. The first is that, as Mr Hobson didn't actually eat at the Old Crown the review contravenes TripAdvisor's own T&Cs and could be appealed. The second is that the Old Crown has had five one star reviews (out of 39 in total) all in the same week in March/April last year. Now that's the most extreme example of repeat lightening strikes anyone at HelpHound can remember! 

In summary

• Make sure all your customers/guests are aware that Dialogue exists for their benefit - if they have an issue (and, for some reason they don't want to bring it to a member of staff in person) they don't need to post it on TripAdvisor
• Use Feedback Manager if you are in any doubt whatsoever about any response to an online review (responses can exacerbate the harm already done by the review)
• Introduce a standard procedure for staff when faced with any kind of 'blackmail'
• We probably wouldn't advise any of our clients to resort to suing (although we do have sympathy with Ms Bird and anyone finding themselves in a similar position)

Search engine evolution - does it spell the deathknell for independent review sites?

We all know the old adage "If it does not appear in page 1 of search it might as well not appear at all."

Independent review sites, whatever their nature, depend for their influence on their position in any given Google search. If they don't feature on page 1 of a Google search, then their influence over our buying habits wanes fast.

Let's see what we mean in practice:

The search term "Hotel [in] Kensington" - in 2013 returned the following result:


 
Today* there is no return at all for TripAdvisor 'above the fold': 

With Google Hotelfinder and Google Places reviews prominent:

And the first return for TripAdvisor down here after the 'Magic 7'...

So what does this mean for our clients?

We are not suggesting that you completely refocus all your efforts away form TripAdvisor to Google today, TripAdvisor is still consulted by a massive proportion of travellers, and old habits die hard. But do remember Bebo - at it's height it was by far the largest social network (10.7 million users in the UK alone) but was killed off by the arrival of Facebook. Dominant today does not guarantee dominance tomorrow.

Web users are notoriously fickle, and when searching the overwhelming majority will pursue the first relevant result served to them by Google, whatever its origin.

Our advice

Clients with few Google reviews should speak to us. We will help you plan a strategy to get reviews to Google without diverting them away from TripAdvisor, for the timebeing.

*Remember that Google returns search results depending on your own individual search history, so search results will not be uniform for everyone.

Dialogue™ for the medical profession

More than ever before the medical and caring professions have to address the concept of reviews

First let's examine the current state of the reviews and the medical profession...

Specialist sites

If a business or service exists you can be sure that there will be review sites specifically targeting it, it's the nature of the web. Here are some examples:

From NHS Choices

From IWantGreatCare

General sites

A 'general' review site is one where anyone can comment on any type of business or service, from accountants to zoos. here's an example of a review on Yelp, the big daddy of them all...

Yelpers don't pull their punches!

Benefits

Everyone wants reviews: patients commonly search the web for them; they want to know what the existing patients of a given practice or practitioner think. In today's competitive environment practitioners welcome honest feedback as a way of attracting new patients, and, just as importantly, a way of gaining valuable insight.

Drawbacks

Not all reviews are written with the best of intentions: some are written maliciously (some have even been known to be posted by competitors)! Much more commonly, misguided (and potentially damaging) opinions are posted about complex medical issues without the practitioner being able to engage with the patient beforehand.

Is this really representative of the practice?

Right-of-reply

With reviews of hotels or restaurants the simple 'right-of-reply' which is incorporated into most review sites may be all that is needed to correct misconceptions. This is not enough for medical issues: they are far too important, for the patient in question and for the potential patient reading the review. There has to be a better way...

There is. All reviews at HelpHound are moderated (read by trained professional moderators) in a process we call Resolution ™, and any reviews that contain issues which should be addressed by the practitioner are first forwarded to that practitioner for response. 

People actively engage with this process and both parties find it rewarding, to the extent that over 99% of reviews that are written and subject to Resolution result in no final review being published. 

Administration

It's every medical practitioner's nightmare - more paperwork, more complex technology. How to keep track of the 47 sites where a patient might comment? The answer is simple: you don't have to. 

Invite all your patients to write a simple review, direct to your practice, once a year and/or whenever they feel the need...

What your patients' reviews will look like on your website - a mock-up with thanks to Abingdon Medical Practice

HelpHound will moderate them and we will publish them on your own website; we will also invite your patients to post their reviews to Google so you don't look like these GPs when future patients search:

Your prospective patients are looking for reviews - here (on Google) and on your own website, but only one patient has posted one review on one of these practices. What a lost opportunity to benefit for everyone concerned, practice and patients alike

To summarise

Dialogue brings you and your patients all the benefits of reviews and none of the drawbacks: it can only be good for you both.

• Great feedback, easily analysed 
• Positive comments to show to prospective patients
• Negative issues managed in private, benefiting both parties equally
 

Please contact Karen Hutchings (karen.hutchings@helphound) for more details.

Estate Agents: Google 'Denial' is not an option

It is so simple that it has been overlooked by the majority of estate agents. What is it? It's the impact your Google star rating will have once you have the first five qualifying reviews.

Let's look at a real-life example: this agent currently has four reviews and so no star rating...

Just one more review, and their listing could be well on the way to looking something very like this:

Helpful? We don't think so. 

So what strategy to adopt? Get Dialogue on board and get your staff focussed on driving your reviews to Google - now, before your Google star rating bites back.

A P.S. for those as yet unconvinced....

...You have no preconceptions about the local agents; which one gets your first call? And (maybe even more importantly) if you end up with an average showing less than 4 full stars: which one doesn't get a call at all?

Cornell University and ReviewPro - essential viewing for every hospitality professional

A huge vote of thanks to Cornell School of Hospitality and ReviewPro for this study. For those who have an hour to spare we seriously recommend watching the whole presentation; here we present some of the key findings and overlay some of our own conclusions...

   
Online reputation and RevPAR

This study conclusively proves what we have always contended: that the two are inextricably linked:

• If you can positively impact your online reputation (your TripAdvisor ranking and your Booking.com score) your RevPAR will rise
• This applies equally to volume (occupancy) and rates. Until now businesses where occupancy was not an issue were sceptical about how scores impact on rates - no longer!

ReviewPro/Revinate and Dialogue 

Services like those provided by ReviewPro are invaluable for identifying and internally addressing the areas being criticised by guests. Acting on the detailed feedback these services provide will enhance the guest experience and is bound to feed through into more positive reviews.


Combine this with Dialogue and you will turbocharge the results: ReviewPro impacting on your ability to focus on improving the guest experience and Dialogue translating that into more positive reviews (by 20%+) and fewer negative reviews (by as much as 75%) and you will see the difference impact on RevPAR - dramatically.

Here are just two screenshots from the presentation:

Occupancy and Rates

And...

Showing that online reputation up = RevPAR up - and, interestingly more for 3 and 4 star hotels than their 5 star bretheren (the result for 2 star hotels was even more marked: at 1.9). Just a 1% increase in your TripAdvisor ranking (from 200 to 198 etc.) leading to a 1% increase in RevPAR

For further interpretation and advice please contact Karen (karen.hutchings@helphound.com).