Monthly Archives: October 2016

With over five hundred articles on this blog we periodically publish this guide, so anyone new to HelpHound can bring themselves rapidly up to speed.

HelpHound: review managers

We are professional advisers. In just the same way as your accountants or lawyers we give both proactive and reactive advice to make sure your business looks as good as it possibly can:

• On your own website
• On Google 
• On any other sites that matter 

This article – HelpHound in 2016 – shows examples of results for estate agency, but they apply across the full spectrum of businesses. Adding Value shows the difference between a HelpHound client and those yet to engage.


Trust: for reviews to be effective they must be 100% trustworthy


Trust is everything examines why so many of the independent review sites fail this crucial test. It’s one of the many reasons that Google – which is increasingly trusted by consumers – plays such a big part in our strategy on behalf of our clients.

There are so many aspects of this clients’ display that we have included specifically to reinforce the trustworthyness of their reviews:

• the wording next to our logo – the promise that ‘these reviews are genuine’ is supported by the word ‘unfiltered’. The ‘promise to publish’ is critical
• it is also supported by the ‘write your review’ button – showing anyone reading the reviews that anyone can write a review at any time
• and the ‘Worst’ category in ‘Order by’ – the first thing most people do is look at the least favourable reviews
• last, but by no means least, the words ‘Our partner HelpHound is an unbiased independent reviews service’ without which these reviews would revert to the much weaker status of testimonials

As Google reviews accelerate it’s tempting to go it alone


Businesses that had no reviews – or few – just a year ago, like this one (13 reviews this time last year, 77 today) often first attempt to address the situation themselves. This article – Why DIY leaves half the job undone – explains how businesses lose out by going down the do-it-yourself route.


The Google filter

When businesses first realise that they are subject to the Google filter, either because they don’t have five or more reviews or because they score less than 4.0 out of 5, it can cause understandable consternation. Read The Google Filter – Don’t Panic! and relax.


Engage with reviews


Reviews can be a daunting subject. For many businesses it will be the first time they have ever asked customers to comment on the service they provide, and certainly the first time they have asked them to do it publicly (and it doesn’t come much more public than on Google). Too posh to push is an article with a tongue-in-cheek title but a very important message – if you don’t engage with reviews you will be missing out on a wonderful way to drive new business, besides which you will leave your business exposed when your competitors do engage.


Negative reviews – they will happen


No business is perfect. We know because we see thousands of reviews every month! And one of the main reasons businesses don’t engage with reviews is the understandable fear of inviting publicly visible negative reviews. That’s one of the main reasons that we advise clients to invite reviews to their own websites before they invite their customer to copy their review to Google: so our client business can engage with their ‘not so happy’ customers and resolve issues pre-publication – a process we call Resolution™ – and it works brilliantly for both customer and business. We will guide you through each and every case to ensure the best possible outcome. 


The benefits of professional review management


If you have followed half the links we’ve embedded in this article you will already know the answer, but we’ll summarise anyway:

1. Great reviews – on your own website and on Google – drive business
2. Independent review sites are – with few exceptions – yesterday’s solution
3. Review management is about much more than simply getting great reviews – it’s about managing the process professionally – and that’s what we do for our clients

We leave the final word to one of those clients:

If you cannot trust reviews, what is their point? Our answer: there’s no point at all.

You might expect us to launch into a defence of reviews, but we are not going to. Why? Because we agree with much of the thrust of what the Times is saying.

Before online reviews there was advertising and there were testimonials and there were reviews written by journalists. At least with advertising you know the business is putting its own spin on the message, and with testimonials it’s the same – have you ever read a critical testimonial? And, while we’re sure the Times’ journalists have never been guilty of this – there were reviews written by journalists who had benefited from the product or service under review. From free holidays to long-term ‘loans’ of products from food-mixers to motor cars.


So along came the web – and with it, online consumer reviews. But there were, and still are, reviews and reviews. 


In theory:


Reviews should be the answer to all consumers’ prayers: honestly held opinions, freely available for all to see before a product is purchased or a service is contracted.


In practice: 


It’s – still – a minefield. Why? Because of two things: human nature and the business interests of those publishing the reviews.


Human nature


It’s not compulsory to write a review when you’ve purchased a product or stayed in a hotel. So who does? Leaving aside those kind folk who see it as their life’s mission to help people they have never met find the ideal toast-rack, it is much more likely to be someone who is dissatisfied (about 15 times more likely according to Cornell School of Hospitality’s research). And this tilts the playing-field away from the product or service. In the world of online reviews if a product or service scores 9 out of 10 (or 4.5 out of 5 in Google’s own world) it’s probably pretty near perfect. Just because you cannot please all of the people all of the time – one person’s ideal hotel is another guest’s hell-on-earth. 


But – on this benchmark – why are so many businesses we see on the web pretty near perfect in terms of their reviews and scores? It would be charitable to think that, because businesses mostly strive to be as good as possible, for purely commercial reasons, then most of them come close. 


Just for a moment let’s look at a recent example of a business where the online reviews are in conflict with one of the Times’s august journalists:

And here’s the same Hotel on TripAdvisor:

And here’s a guest review written a week after Mr Coren stayed:

What can we learn from this? It would be nice to be able to say that Giles Coren and ‘aday375’ (for that is the TripAdvisor reviewer’s username) have differing requirements and standards, but, unfortunately it’s not as simple as that. Because we don’t know for certain that ‘aday375’ is a bona-fide guest. And this is of fundamental importance as far as HelpHound is concerned: if the review platform cannot stand behind its reviews, or is not doing its utmost to ensure that all its reviews – and reviewers – are genuine, then we think consumers should be encouraged to view it with a deal of scepticism. 


As regular readers of this blog are aware, we have written about this aspect of TripAdvisor – and other review sites – for as long as we can remember. And, again: for as long as we can remember, TripAdvisor have been responding with the same platitudes as this quote in today’s Times:

Not good enough TripAdvisor.


For reasons better known to TripAdvisor, in spite of their acknowledgment that ‘fraud is an ever changing landscape‘, it is just as easy to write a fraudulent review now, in 2016, as it was in the early days of TripAdvisor. A reviewer can still register with any old Hotmail email address, you can still hide behind a ‘MickeyMouse123’ username, you still don’t have to provide any evidence that you have stayed at the hotel you are reviewing – you don’t even have to provide evidence that you have visited the country where the hotel you are reviewing is located! We know, because we opened a new TripAdvisor account today.


It may have been ‘good enough’ in 2002 when technology was clunky, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was still in high school and G+ was not even a gleam in Google’s eye. But it is definitively not good enough now. There are myriad ways that a company like TripAdvisor (profit of $63 million on turnover of $1.4billion at last count) could give its reviews, and its reviewers, more credibility. So why doesn’t it? Is is because of Abraham Lincoln’s old adage that ‘You can fool… all of the people’? Or is it, more prosaically, because its share price is influenced by the volume of reviews that are written?


Our message to TripAdvisor: Invest in credibility or, one day, ‘all of the people’ may rumble you.


It’s not only TripAdvisor. We know of another popular review site where, for fairness’s sake, any paying business member can appeal a review that they consider unfair, misleading or inaccurate and it will be suspended pending a response from the reviewer. So far so good, but unfortunately our old friend human nature plays into unscrupulous businesses’ hands here as well: they found that if they appealed every negative review, very few reviewers would bother to engage with the review site a second time. These sites are now known in the trade as ‘nine-out-of-ten’ sites because all their savvy business clients score – you guessed it – nine out of ten!

There is a flip side too: sites like Yelp believe so fervently in freedom of speech that a reviewer who has never used or visited a business can trash a business’s reputation simply because they don’t like something the business was reported as doing in the press.

It gets worse before it gets better: there’s one big US site that provides a feed of reviews for it’s business customers to display on their own websites. Again: so far so good, until you realise that the business can choose which reviews to display. Sigh!

Thank you Google

Thank goodness, from the consumer’s point-of-view, that Google got stuck in – better late than never – to the world of online reviews. They made some of the same mistakes in the early days, but they have upped their game recently. At least there are far fewer ‘A Google user’ anonymous reviews now compared with the early days. But there are disadvantages: it is still very difficult for a business to appeal against a review that is unfair or misleading. 

Given the power Google has in influencing consumers – with a huge amount of real-estate on page 1 of search devoted to Google reviews, we think they could usefully loosen up their appeals process to allow patently false reviews to be appealed (we had success for this client whose hotel had been maligned by a sofa-bound TV-watching critic, but only after the hotelier had resorted to the national press and we offered to help).

So what about our clients’ reviews?

As you might imagine from reading everything we have said so far, we have put a lot of effort into making sure the reviews that our clients display give a fair and accurate impression of our clients’ businesses. After all, it’s our name on the review on their website.

Let’s follow our process right through from invitation to final review – and question every stage:

Stage 1. Our client – the business – sends an invitation to its customer to write a review. Or someone – who may of may not be a customer, visits the business’s website and clicks on their ‘write a review’ button. 

How does HelpHound know that the business is inviting bona-fide customers to post reviews? If
a business really wanted to get fake favourable reviews published in
theory they could – by seeding their mailing list. But we have a strict
two strikes rule at HelpHound. If a business is found to have in any way
encouraged a fake review they receive a written warning, if they repeat
the behavior they are put into purdah pending an investigation (no more
reviews will be published). If the investigation establishes that there
is malice aforethought (as opposed to an intern ‘trying to be helpful’)
their membership of HelpHound is terminated.
 
Stage 2. Our moderators read the review and then send an email to the reviewer so they can verify that they are the author of the review. If the review contains abuse or allegations of illegality we respond to the reviewer inviting them to re-submit their review. In the case of illegality they will be informed that they must seek legal advice.

Why won’t we accept abuse? We don’t consider that abusive reviews help anyone – consumer or business. If a consumer wants to abuse a business, including using ‘foul and abusive’ language there are websites like Yelp that will happily publish their views. The core ethos of HelpHound is built around the concept of businesses and consumers working together to ensure, as far as is possible, a satisfactory outcome for both. That does not mean that the consumer cannot rate the business one star as well as giving it a thorough going-over, it just means they have to use the kind of language acceptable in a family newspaper.
 
Stage 3. Either: Positive reviews are published to the business’s HelpHound module displayed on their website, whilst simultaneously an email is sent to the reviewer telling them that their review has been published and inviting them to copy their review to a second platform of the business’s choice (Google, or Facebook or TripAdvisor – or any other open site).

Can the business/reviewer respond? Yes. If the positive review is subsequently established to be inaccurate or misleading can it be deleted? Yes, but the reviewer will be invited to post a revised review.

Stage 3. Or: Negative reviews are sent to the business for comment. An email is sent simultaneously to the reviewer informing them and reinforcing their right to have their final review published, whatever the business’s response to the reviewer – we call this system Resolution™ because it is specifically designed so consumers can resolve issues with the business concerned. In theory the correspondence between the reviewer and the business has no cut-off point. In practice it is unusual for either party to communicate more then once or twice.

What if the reviewer insists on having their original review published? That’s their right, and a proportion do. The business also has the right of reply and the reviewer has the right to edit their review.    

Can a complete outsider influence our moderation policy? yes, anyone – absolutely anyone – can flag any published review on a HelpHound clients’ site and it will be reviewed.

And finally…

There is a downside of this for HelpHound: we cannot work for or with a business that is not seriously committed to excellence in customer service. Because bad businesses will look bad thanks to our system. Their customers would rightly insist on their negative reviews being posted – and they would end up scoring badly. But that’s the only way we are happy to stand four square behind what we do.

At HelpHound we have done our utmost to make this system as fair to all parties concerned as we possibly can whilst retaining everyone’s trust. Resolution is very popular – we often get positive comments from users – and effective. But if you have any suggestions about how we can refine or improve it please comment.

…and the other half exposing your business to criticism from your competitors.

This business has a great score and a meaningful number of reviews on Google. And they have just joined HelpHound. Why?

The short answer: Because they understood that there was much more to professional review management than simply having great reviews on Google.

In more detail:


The world of reviews and review management is evolving at a pace. And this applies to the way your prospective customers consume reviews as well. Two or three years ago it was common for businesses to ignore reviews altogether – we were often met with comments like “What kind of people write these reviews?” and, more importantly, “What kind of people believe these reviews?”


Now the very same businesses are saying “OK, ‘normal’ people do write reviews, and our prospective customers are impressed by businesses with great reviews.” More often, though, we receive a panic call from a business that has finally realised that the phone is not ringing because of negative reviews. 


The instinctive knee-jerk reaction of all these businesses is the same: to get reviews to Google.


Here we show you why that is only part of adopting a professional review management strategy.


Potential customers:


They react – instinctively – to reviews in search. Both positive and negative – and importantly – to their absence. Having no – or few – reviews is not impressive. Look at these three businesses:

The first has not engaged – they have one review; what impression does that give? That they do little business? That they don’t care about the image they present in search? Is there anything positive about this – very common – lack of engagement and concern? 

The second has at least got enough reviews to warrant a Google score – but some cynics out there might well say that any business could do that with a twenty minute ring round their friends. On top of that the are lucky that those five reviews are mostly positive – since a consumer is nearly fifteen times more likely to write a review – unprompted – if they have had a negative experience.

The third? Don’t both the score and the number of reviews say so much about the business? That they are great at what they do (even the most hardened cynic would be stretched to say that they could muster 283 tame reviewers!)? That they care about their image in search, and therefore maybe they care about doing a great job for their customers? Imagine your business finds itself in competition with that business.   

Now, we know that your customers find you in lots more ways than simply searching online; but if they have found you through…

• Personal recommendation
• Advertising – print
• Advertising – radio or TV
• Advertising – web
• PR
• Other marketing efforts

…what is the very first thing they are going to do, before they make that crucial first contact? Absolutely – they are going to google you. Even if only to find your phone number or to look for some other form of contact mechanism. And how you look there is bound to influence them.

So, now you accept that your business needs to impress on Google, you decide to get your happy customers to leave reviews there.

WAIT! Read on before you take that step. 

Your competitors

Now that most
businesses are aware that some of their competitors look really
impressive on Google they are formulating
strategies to undermine them.

Bear in mind that the following are a distillation of many conversations with hundreds of businesses a year…

• Denial – barely rates as a strategy, but surprisingly common, even in 2016. The business that still maintains that reviews are not written by ‘their kind of customer’. Well they are – just look at any market-leading business, in whatever sphere – and you will find reviews. Here are two articles that address this: ‘Too posh to push‘ and ‘Google reviews accelerate‘. It only takes a competitor to say “We’re up-to-date with all our marketing, and that includes our review management – just look at [our competitor], if they are so behind with reviews, I wonder what kind of job they do for their customers?”
  

• Sign up to an independent site: from the largest – the likes of Yelp and TripAdvisor – to the smallest specialist sites, they will all be grateful for your custom. Take estate agency as an example: over the last five years some agents have been through as many as four independent solutions. Starting with Referenceline, through allAgents, then Rateragent and now Feefo and TrustPilot. None of these compares with the power of Google – from the point-of-view of visibility or brand. Search for any business and you see Google reviews first and foremost. Do people believe Google reviews? Yes – because anyone can write one, whenever they want, and because Google is such an ubiquitous brand. If your business uses an independent site your competitors will only have to say “but look at their Google reviews” and you will be on the back foot. Read ‘If an independent review site is right for your business…‘

• Direct to Google: if you invite your customers to write reviews direct to Google you are missing out on having independently verified reviews on your own website (testimonials simply don’t cut it any more); besides that your competitors will be able to call the probity of your Google reviews into question:  it is so easy for them to say “I see they have X reviews on Google, do you think that’s all of their customers, or just the happy ones?” Read ‘Getting a flying start‘

The business we alluded to at the top of this article had already accepted the power of reviews, but they recognised that they needed to:

• have bullet-proof credibility – both with Google reviews and reviews on their own website
• get many more reviews to Google, and keep them up-to-date, month in month out
• get reviews – rather than testimonials – on their own website – independently verified for credibility
• be able to state that all their clients are able to write a review – whenever they want to
• have a mechanism for managing misleading or inaccurate reviews pre-publication
• be able to defend themselves against any competitor or potential client who might infer that they only invite reviews from their happy customers

And finally:

Read this and then get professional review management working for your business.

As regular readers will know, we have always had issues with ‘closed’ review sites. 

What is a closed review site?

It is a site where the reviewer must be invited, by the business or the review site, to write a review. On the face of it this logic is flawless: only a verified customer of the business can write a review. If we all lived in a vacuum, where that kind of site was the only option, they would – and still can – have many advantages:

• those reading the reviews know that they are reading genuine reviews, written by real customers
• the business can rest easy in the knowledge that unscrupulous reviewers – competitors or disgruntled ex-employees – cannot write a review and do it harm

The problem, though, is that we don’t live in that ideal vacuum, and our customers, whatever the nature of our business, have myriad options if they want to write a review, invited or uninvited.

Perhaps it would help if we looked at two examples: first for hotels:

Two (or more) of you stay in a hotel that you have booked through an online travel agency. On checkout you receive an email inviting a review of your stay. But who, in this example, is ‘you’? ‘You’ is the person who made the booking. Suppose one of you loved the hotel and the other hated it – it does happen – the hotel now has a 50/50 chance of getting a great/awful review. And, more importantly, the second guest must look elsewhere to voice their opinion.

So they go to TripAdvisor or Google.

Next: an estate agent sends a closed invitation to its client. In this case the situation is a little more complex. Just like the hotel, there may be more than one client – but an efficient estate agent will know that and send two invitations. Job done – or is it? 

Unlike staying in a hotel, the relationship an estate agent has with their clients is often – especially in the case of lettings, ongoing. A landlord or tenant who is happy when they receive the closed invitation may not be happy a month – or a year – later. 

We have many examples of sellers who have written glowing reviews on exchange who have come back again to post a negative review. We have reviews from purchasers who have raised issues many months post-purchase. Some of you will be thinking – isn’t that a case for a closed system?

No! Just because the client cannot write a review without being invited does not mean that they won’t write a review somewhere else. A decent percentage will – perhaps to one of the specialist open sites – AllAgents for example, but much more likely to Google. We recently audited a great firm of agents who had overwhelmingly positive reviews on a closed review site. But nearly one in six of their reviews on Google were negative. What was happening? By using a closed site they were unconsciously forcing their less than happy clients to resort to posting a Google review.

HelpHound to the rescue:

It is so important to allow everyone to write a review:

• both guests in a hotel
• people who used your spa, restaurant or bar – but did not stay
• every guest in a restaurant
• every tenant in a property
• people who, for whatever reason, considered using your business, but decided not to

But – we hear those of you who are reading this but are yet to be HelpHound clients say – “what about bogus/inaccurate/unfair reviews?” 

That’s where HelpHound’s Resolution™ comes in: every review is moderated, and all those containing negative scores or comments are first asked to verify their connection with your business. This might, for a hotel, be to identify the precise date of stay and their room number, for an estate agent: the member of staff they were dealing with and the address of the property concerned. If and when the reviewer does verify – and ‘fake’ reviewers never do, for obvious reasons – their review will then be forwarded to the business so it can engage and respond. It gives both the customer and the business an opportunity to resolve (hence the name ‘Resolution’) any misunderstandings and to put wrongs right pre-publication – and is extremely popular with consumers and businesses alike. 

So – fear of unfair criticism is not a reason to choose a ‘closed’ review site. Fear of driving aggrieved customers into the arms of Google is a definite reason to choose review management. Welcome to HelpHound!

Since we first wrote about this in May many more of our clients have had success in using a ‘multiple’ invitation. Here we explain the ‘why’s and how’s’.

But first – what exactly is a ‘Multiple’ invitation? Here is an example:

So: a multiple invitation gives your client a choice – between your own website, and any other sites that matter (in the example above – Google and Facebook).

Why send a multiple invitation?

All of your clients can leave a review on your website – the direct link in your email takes them straight to the review box – job done.

More clients than you might expect can leave a Google review – and that is the most visible and powerful place to have reviews these days. 


Most clients will have a Facebook account – and that’s a powerful place to have reviews these days.

If you have done a really good job, you will be pleasantly surprised just how many of your clients will repeat their review across multiple platforms – often all three. Especially if you actively encourage them to do so.


But what if the client is not completely happy?


All of you are aware that Resolution – within the HelpHound system – allows you an opportunity to engage with your less than happy clients pre-publication. That’s the reason we advise all new clients to start with the single invitation to write a review through HelpHound. 

When we first introduced the multiple invitation it was tested by established clients and monitored very closely here at HelpHound. The last thing we – and our clients – wanted was inaccurate and misleading negative reviews cropping up on Google and Facebook. 

We are now confident that this will not happen. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of clients who had some issue or other with the service provided – and we are talking very nearly 100% here – choose to post to the agent’s website, not Google or Facebook.


The advantages of the ‘Multiple invitation’:

1. One email – job done
2. Clients who choose to post to your own website are still invited to copy their review to Google
3. Great results

Action needed:


Speak to Karen Hutchings or one of her team here at HelpHound. She will make sure that you have the correct links to embed into your multiple invitation. She will also advise you how to make sure your business’s Facebook page (you can restrict the invitation to just your site and Google) is set up to receive and show reviews.