Everyone knows reviews are a big deal for businesses, whether they’re huge online retailers or the little restaurant down the street. Whether you love them or hate them, they’re something marketers have to deal with from time to time. I don’t think I’ve ever met with a client who wasn’t at least a little wary of being open to reviews from any and every customer they’ve ever had. They have lots of questions about the process, and there are some common issues that they might encounter. I’ll give you some of the most important things nobody tells you about getting in the review game.
1. Consistency is EVERYTHING. Make sure the name of the company, address, telephone number, and website are exactly the same in every single instance. We’re talking about detail down to whether or not you have a comma before the Inc. or not. While both would show up in a search, “Refreshweb and Co.” and “Refreshweb and Company” would be different listings on a review site. It’s important to work on merging duplicate listings into just one correct one and getting errors fixed.
2. Don’t Game the System. The algorithms for big review sites are incredibly sophisticated and complex. They can track all kinds of things, and the odds of you getting way more penalty than reward are very high. Reviews will come in eventually for most businesses. It sends up flags when reviews come in from the same IP address, when they’re really high or low ratings, when a user is new or hasn’t reviewed a lot or has reviewed a lot in a very brief period of time. They know all the shortcuts to look stellar and the review site’s reputation depends entirely on their ability to keep out biased and fake reviews. Not gaming the system also applies to the ToS agreements that you really should read. Did you know that soliciting reviews is prohibited on most? That doing it can get you barred from being listed or have all your great reviews removed? There are ways to encourage reviews with window stickers and such. Offering a promo for someone who brings in a printed out review is not one of those good ways. People will inevitably mention it in a review, and you’ll pay the price. One of my favorite salons lost almost a decade of great reviews for soliciting that way.
3. Resistance is Futile. You don’t get a say in whether or not your company gets reviewed. Any user can add a review for a company and speak their mind. Ignoring what people are saying for fear of negative feedback only means spending more time making the mistakes that are costing you customers. People are smart enough to spot a grumpy person who likes to complain and not give too much weight to their words. However, if several people are having the same issue with a company and it goes unaddressed, you can bet that it will cost you both reputation and profits.
4. Where Did That Review Go? Because a review site’s reputation depends on people trusting them to have unbiased reviews, from time to time reviews are filtered out. Usually it’s because they’re either one star or five star, or the user or business being reviewed is new, or a combination of both. Yelp is notorious for this, much to the frustration of business owners. They do hold the filtered reviews in reserve, and they may be put back in place if they are determined to be trustworthy over time. Yelp’s explanation of their filtering process is here.
5. You’ve Gotta Be Patient. The process of claiming or populating a business’ listings and verifying them is time consuming, and it can take over a month for them to be approved and live. Waiting for a body of reviews to build up takes even longer. If you have a problem, like bad reviews for a company with a similar name, it can take what seems like forever for customer service to get it off your page. It’s important to set client expectations correctly and help them understand that this is a small but important piece of the whole strategy.
6. Is This Right for You? Reviews aren’t the right thing for every business, especially in B2B. Testimonials are better suited for that space. Be realistic about what to expect and what level of management reviews are going to require. Some businesses will rarely get a review and should check their listings occasionally, while a hip new restaurant or bar may get dozens a week and need to have a manager who checks them daily to respond to problems and issues on the fly. Dealing with high volume and volatile reviews requires a lot of diplomacy, patience, and wisdom. Make sure that the person dealing with them on a day to day basis knows how to look for and summarize useful feedback (positive and negative), and that they are empowered to make bad situations right when a review brings it to their attention. Yelp has great tools to let businesses respond to bad reviews (which you should do by private message, btw). It’s always nice when customers see a bad review updated to a higher rating when the business has gone out of their way to make things right. Don’t underestimate the value of redeeming a bad situation or your reviewers’ understanding that people make mistakes sometimes.