What You Need to Know About Customer Reviews

I'm ready. Thank you Angela. It's good to be here today, and I'm excited to talk to you guys about something that's really really kind of a passion of mine. I do as Angela said, I'm one of the local SEO Specialists here, but the thing that that I really enjoy working with is reviews and helping our customers get more views and handle their reviews the right way? So let's jump right into our presentation today, which is what you need to know about customer reviews.

And so what we will do here's our agenda for today. We will go over why reviews matter. We're going to talk about why reviews matter in today's Marketplace.

Next we'll go over some ways on how you can get reviews if you don't have any or if you do have some reviews, but you want to get more we can talk about how to get more reviews.

We'll talk about the importance of monitoring incoming reviews and then we'll wrap up with responding to reviews why it's important and some do's and don'ts related to responding to reviews.

So first we're going to talk about why reviews matter and the first reason that reviews matter is that reviews help your businesses online visibility.

When you search for a business, you know, it's not going to take you long to find what others have to say about it. You know, it's probably going to be one of the first things they see. Google takes review ratings from multiple sites into consideration when they determine the order of businesses that show up in the local search results, as you can see on this screen here. The image on the left if you have an iPhone or iPad when you ask Siri, you know, find me a pizza restaurant, you know in the screen on in the black screen shot on the left, you've got three pizza locations listed three pizza restaurants and reviews are prominently shown in with the address and the distance the star average and the total number of reviews.

Then when you go to if you're in Apple Maps and you search for pizza or hair salon or coffee shop and you see all those little pins and you tap on one it will give you driving time the name of the location and it will tell you how many stars and how many reviews. Now Apple has partnered with Yelp. So they use reviews. They show the reviews from Yelp. On the right is a screenshot from Google Maps the desktop version and somebody looking for “best allergy doctor” in Alpharetta, which is a suburb of Atlanta in Georgia. So the reviews that are the listings that are served up. In this first one it shows the average review score. How many total reviews prominent right under the name of the business. Or, in this case the name of the doctor. As you can also see in this image text from a review that a patient wrote that matches what this person searched for are bolded. So best doctor that's bolded out to best doctor to go for your allergy. So those three words that appeared in the search query are bolded. Google will pull that part of that review out and put it in the search result there. And as you can see in the second one allergy testing quick and efficient, so you know that also is a match. But this one is bolded because you've got three of your five, really four because it is not really one of the major query words. So three of those four words are bolded because they all appear in that one review.

According to most industry experts online reviews and the location of the Searcher influence local search engine visibility more than anything else and in things that I've seen with our clients and in looking at other businesses that that definitely rings true. You know reviews matter they help get your business in front of more eyes. Reviews and review sites, play a part in your overall web presence, you know because you've got your other information out there - your business name, your address, your phone number. So those are places that we've talked before about making sure that name address and phone number or NAP that's correct and consistent. Part of that is making sure that it's right on these other review sites, like, you know TripAdvisor if you're a bed and breakfast or a restaurant or Open Table if you're a restaurant

Those third-party sites, you want your prospects, your customers to have a good experience with you no matter where they're interacting or trying to interact with your business. So keeping your name, address and phone number consistent not only presents that consistent presence for your consumers, but it can also help your business rank better in the search results.

So again, here for those who use Apple’s Siri and will show then there's the result from Google.

And so the next reason why reviews matter is that reviews impact purchasing decisions Angela touched on this briefly. People who leave reviews, they've really got nothing to gain or lose. They had an experience good or bad or sometimes indifferent but usually people that don't really feel one way or the other usually won't post a review or post their feedback about it. But most customers had an experience good or bad and they want to share it and people listen to that.

This graphic here is from the most recent local consumer review survey from Brightlocal and it shows that 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends or family. These days Word of Mouth comes from all kinds of places. It comes from outside the consumers’ Social Circle and with an online review having a ripple of a happy or an unhappy customers positive reviews have a big impact on consumers. According to their survey 94 percent say that positive reviews make them more likely to use a business.

Reviews with a high star rating positive sentiment have a significant impact on a consumers decision whether not to use a business. So it's vitally important to make sure that your reviews, you know that you're getting reviews and that you're asking for reviews and on the flip side, as you can see in the middle section negative reviews that make customers more likely to not use a business that number increased to 92%.

A consistent, or in a lot of cases, a recent history of negative reviews because like when you go on Google or you go on Yelp or go on any of these review sites, you can sort by most recent. Because a bad review from two years ago, you know doesn't hold as much weight as a bad review from last week. And in the mind of a consumer because a lot of things can happen in two years. If it's a restaurant there's people consistently posting about long wait times cold food, rude waiters that type of thing and if that's recent, you know that's going to weigh on a decision that a customer makes as to whether they want to go eat at that restaurant.

The takeaway here is that reviews both positive and negative are very important to local business.

The third reason why reviews matter is that they provide important feedback. Here's an example of a review on Google for a week for a restaurant. And so this person Abigail wrote “waited a long time open seats were visible the hostess and waitress were efficient, but curt. Nice big patio. But it wasn't open.” Then a quick comment about how the guacamole was fresh but it was heavy on the onion. So, you know, there's a lot that you can learn from a review that somebody leaves for your business.

You know, what do they love about your business? What are they not so crazy about? Paying attention to your reviews helps you do more of the good and less of the bad. I'll just say this right here and I'll probably mention it again later. Negative reviews aren't always a bad thing. You know, you can see if there's a common theme like we'd like I mentioned before or you know, if you're a restaurant and you're getting reviews from people saying that you know, the food keeps coming out cold or you know, this particular server was rude, you can look for common themes in those negative reviews, maybe people have a hard time getting ahold of you or they're finding that information about you or they're just receiving slow service. Like in this instance here. It could be that a sous chef doesn't have the guacamole nailed down just yet. So regardless, negative reviews can help you discover and fix issues before they become a bigger problem.

And of course with positive reviews, you can confidently market what you find to be most popular with your customers.

So how do you get more reviews like this meme here, "Please sir I want some more." I think every business owner would like more reviews both good and bad. So, how do you get more reviews?

You just have to ask. You've got to ask customers for reviews. You don't want to leave it up to the to the customer. Yes, you got to ask for more reviews. It's up to you to ask every customer. You have to leave a review you can have ways for customers to leave reviews on their own. But don't depend on the customer to instinctively leave one for your business.

Many times people tend to take initiative and leave reviews if the service or product was really good or if it was really bad, you know, like we said people who were indifferent or had an okay experience. They're not that likely to on their own leave a review but you should ask every customer, you know, and there's lots of ways to do that, but you should be asking every customer to leave feedback.

Doing that you're increasing the likelihood of getting more of those people who don't fall into either the really great experience or really bad experience to leave you feedback.

And as with anything, there's a wrong way and a right way to do things and asking for reviews is no different. So let's go over some of the wrong ways to ask for reviews. First off don't offer a script or a template for customers to use. Some businesses have tried. They feel like, you know, some people may say I don't know what to say. You want to write a review and so some businesses feel like they're helping by offering this script or a template for customers to use and their feedback.

Some businesses have basically even said, you know, here's a few examples of great reviews. Just take one of these and kind of make it your own. Well, this is bad idea number one and it can go bad and go wrong in a number of ways. First off your reviews will begin to look and sound exactly the same and if that happens. It'll trigger a lot of these review platforms to flag your profile or maybe even delete it.

And by doing that by offering this script or a template, you don't really get to hear what your customers really have to say about your business. You know, you want that unfiltered, unedited opinion. You don't want to use a legal term. You don't want to kind of lead the witness here. You don't want to, you know, try to get them to say what you want them to say.

You know it also is unethical and it could damage your business's reputation. The second bullet don't offer incentives for leaving the review - offering discounts, free products, gift cards or straight up payment might seem like a great way to get more people to leave feedback about your business. But the problem is that any review or feedback that you get in exchange for something like that could be seen as tainted or consumers may not feel that they can really be honest in providing their feedback. Also in a lot of cases in lot of locations, it's illegal. Offering incentives is bad idea number two, and it beats the pants off of a bad idea. Number one most review platforms strictly forbid incentivizing reviews, and that's what this is called incentivizing. If they discover that they'll remove them and can perhaps even remove your entire profile on the site or if we’re talking about Google. They can remove your business from Google my Business if they if they feel like something fishy like that's going on. So don't ever offer any kind of quid pro quo types of things in exchange for review.

Third Point don't ask all of your customers at once. So maybe you've got a database of all of your customers and you want to send out a mass email to all of them saying. Alright. I'm going to ask all of our customers to leave us a review and that's in in theory. That sounds like a great idea, but the result usually ends up being that too many reviews appear over a short period of time.

And if that happens readers - but even more the different platforms, the different review services - they may that may throw up a red flag. For them, part of gathering reviews is building trust. So instead make it part of your practice to ask for reviews on a regular basis. You get this constant trickle of feedback rather than a flood of feedback now and then nothing for a short period of time and then another flood of feedback.

You know places like Google and Yelp and TripAdvisor and all those types of review sites. They like to see the steady flow of reviews coming in these platforms take note. When a business gets too many reviews at the same time. They might even hold those reviews in the queue and not display them because they may give off the impression that they're not legitimate.

And the last Point - Don't spam your customer base. Don't repeatedly ask your customers about leaving a review and primarily we're talking, you know via email or via text. If you've got a system set up to do that, you know asking your customers continuously and repeatedly about leaving review could come off as pestering them or spamming them. You don't want to upset your customers so, you know send out your initial request. If you don't get anything back in a couple days. It's absolutely okay to ask again, but if you don't get a response after that second request, you know, I might would wait a week before I send one last request or usually if you ask twice and nothing happens, they're probably not going to leave you a review so you'd be perfectly okay as well just not asking that customer again.

These are some of the wrong ways. So now that we've kind of covered that let's talk about the right way to get more reviews.

First off  make it easy for your customer to leave reviews. You know, your customers don't want to spend a lot of time leaving feedback as a business. You want to make it easy for them to do this. So if you're emailing customers be sure to include the link that takes them right to the place where they can leave their review, you know, or if you're including links to all of your to all of your third-party places like Facebook and TripAdvisor or Open Door or Open Table. Only include one or two, the ones that are most relevant to your company. Another easy way is if you have their cell number, you can send a request via text messaging SMS messaging with the link and then your customer can just tap that link straight to where they can leave the review from their phone.

By making the process easier to reduce the risk of customers giving up part way through the process because if it's long drawn-out takes a long time, you know, they may start it because they really want to leave you feedback. But then they get part of the way through and they get frustrated or they get fed up with how long it's taking and they just give up and you don't want that to happen.

Next make it a company initiative. In my experience the businesses that are the most successful than getting reviews are the ones that have made asking for reviews part of their internal process, whether it's a passive mode such as you know setting up a tablet by the cash register, so that customers can leave quick feedback as they are paying and checking out.

An active method such as sending emails to customers, you know a couple days or a day or two after they've done business with you or some combination of both active and passive. Making asking for reviews a part of your process is one of the simplest things that a business can do to increase the number of reviews that it gets.

Not having a standard review process is like a restaurant where each line cook makes a dish differently, you know, you may have you know, people may order the fettuccine alfredo with chicken, but some people get  fettuccine alfredo, but others may not because they have different cooks. Some cooks don't  want to add the cream or they a different type of cheese. They change the way things should be done and so not every customer gets the same experience. And so when it comes to asking for reviews, you want to have everybody on board, everybody doing the same thing. So that if that's asking a customer when they're paying or when they're checking out you make sure that every employee is doing that you know people aren't skipping that because they're not comfortable asking or they don't feel like doing it or they think it's stupid.

Set that internal process and set that expectation that every customer is going to get asked to leave a review put you can put links everywhere. If you've got a link to where a direct link to where someone can leave a review for you. This is a little bit more of a passive way of asking for reviews, but it goes back to that first point of making it easy. Just a few places, you can put a link in your email signature. I've got one in mind every email that I send out has a link where someone can leave a review for SEO Rocket, you know on your invoices if your business is one that sends out invoices on a regular basis. This can be a consistent way of providing a link to your customers or your vendors to leave feedback for your business? You can create a QR code if you're not sure what a QR code is its those square looks like a pixelly graphic black-and-white graphic. Those have become more popular over the last few years . They came out a while ago and then people stopped using them. And so now the kind of coming back, you know now that you don't have to have a special app on your phone to scan it. If you have an iPhone the camera will notice that it's a QR code and give you a prompt to go to that website and pretty sure that an android phones work the same way. If you can create a QR code and this so somebody scans that QR code take some straight to the place where they can leave a review and you can put a QR code on anything that you have printed, you know mailers, etc. I've seen it where some businesses have put one on their vehicle wrap on a company vehicle. So if you're in your car and you can take your camera point over to the car next to you and scan that QR code and leave a review your boundaries are limited by your imagination when it comes to QR codes. If you can print it you can put our cute put a QR code on it.

You know and if you're a coffee shop or restaurant, salon some other type of business with high traffic or people will sit and do business with you having a tent card on a booth or on your tables with either  the QR code that they can scan with their phone or a code that they can text, send the word coffee to one two, three four to leave us a review. These are great ways to make it easy for customers to leave you feedback.

So so now that we've talked about what you should do to get reviews and how to get more reviews. When they start coming in what do you do?

Monitoring reviews. That's what we're going to talk about here why you should monitor reviews.

First off, you know being able to know what people feel or think about your business can help you make changes or understand why consumers felt the way they did in that moment. You may not be able to be present every hour that your business is open. Maybe you own a restaurant and people are complaining about speed of service or the server that they had on a certain night.

Online reviews can be your eyes and ears so to speak when you're not present even though you may stumble across a negative review from time to time at least you're made aware of the situation. So being made aware of any problems is a great reason for making sure you are monitoring your review, seeing them when they come in. And on the flip side, reviews also can let you know when you're doing things right? You can gain valuable insight about maybe a new company policy or procedure, staff, maybe a new hire from what customers have to say and their feedback. You can learn about the experiences that they have with your business and use it to your advantage knowledge is power.

These are honest reviews. This Insight from your customer is how they view your business. So it lets you see your business through the eyes of your customers and it can give you reliable information and ideas on what you may need to change or improve on so that you can be better. Without customers you wouldn't be in business. Knowing what they really feel can give you an advantage that you need to stay afloat, you know, especially in these tough economic times, with this pandemic. The last year has really been tough.

So monitoring reviews and adjusting how your business operates based on reviews that come in can really be helpful.

So now that you can ask for a review, you know how to ask for reviews and you're monitoring reviews. Let's talk about responding to reviews. And what do I do now? What do I do when a review comes in? So first off we'll talk about responding to negative reviews because I know a lot of businesses are concerned about negative reviews. They're scared about getting them. About how it makes their business look,  scared about should I respond? How do I respond?

So my first response is “yes, absolutely”. You should respond. You should respond to every negative review too. Don't ignore them. That's the worst thing you can do is to ignore a negative review.

So when you get a negative review, what do you do? Well, first off you respond and first, I'll say thank you to show your customers that your business appreciates and values their feedback. Always remember to say thank you in responses. It's a small gesture that can go a long way towards making that customer feel better about you and your business.

Next apologize and sympathize, you know saying sorry shows that you care about your customers. It shows that you're human. That they're not getting some canned response and it also shows that you're not too proud to own up to your mistakes.

Even if it's something that may not be your fault say sorry. Anyway, you know, this is one of those times where being the bigger person. It's a great opportunity to establish and strengthen trust between you and your customer. You don't want to get into any kind of back-and-forth tit-for-tat match with a customer because you know of something, that happened to them and you may feel it's not your fault. So you must even if it's not your fault apologize because this can go a long way. People can turn away from businesses that are too perfect or feel that they're too proud to apologize.

The next point - take responsibility, don't make excuses. Even if what happened to that customer was an uncommon instance or an isolated case or maybe just a person had a bad day, acknowledge the experience that that customer had and at the same time provide reassurance that you hold yourself to high standards, and that's not how your business normally operates. That is kind of the first step towards this next point of trying to make things right.

So when you're dealing with negative feedback try to avoid cookie cutter responses, you know that don't resolve or address a specific issue that the customer brought up in the review. Include details about the customers experience in your response when it's appropriate. And then communicate any changes or improvements you've made or will make as a result of their feedback if there's something you can do to fix what happened. Present a compelling response to the reviewer. Take ownership of the issue and promise to make things right in the future.

And the last point is to offer to take the issue offline. It's always best if you and the customer can talk directly about the problem they had and doing it on the phone rather than going back and forth online.

It just could save any further issues or embarrassment on the businesses side and it also prevents any interference from outside sources, especially on a platform like Facebook where your reviews are public and somebody else may want to jump into the discussion and jump on and provide more negative energy.

Provide direct contact information for customers in your review response. Say I'd love to talk with you about your experience. And please call us at this number and we'd love to talk with you offer to take the issue offline so that you can try to help make that person feel more satisfied with their situation and how it's being handled.

So, you know that those are the things that you should do regarding negative reviews. Now when you get positive reviews, what should you do as a response? Well, yes still respond to every review and yes say thank you show appreciation for that customer who took the time to share their positive experience, you know, we talked about it before great reviews, high review ratings serve are so powerful or attracting new and potential customers. Online reviews are trusted as much or more than Word of Mouth from someone they know. It can attract new customer’s decision-making and your customer really just did you a solid by telling you how much they appreciated your service, your product, how much of a good time they had doing business with you.

Tell customers you can't wait to see them again, you know, you can include that into in your response say thank you for coming in and telling us about your experience. We look forward to seeing you again, especially if somebody writes a review about maybe they came and had dinner at your restaurant on their anniversary make note of that in your response and you can say we hope you choose to come back and spend your anniversary next year with us. You can always encourage them to spread the word and so you can do that in your response.

Or if you have some kind of system setup, you can ask them. “Hey, thank you so much. Would you mind leaving us, feedback on a couple of these other sites on Facebook or on TripAdvisor?”. Encouraging them to spread the word and a lot of times you'll find that customers will do that. They'll be glad to do that.

We've talked a lot today about how to get reviews, how to ask, how to monitor, how to respond, and at SEO Rocket we have a tool that handles a lot of that for our customers is called RocketReviews. What it does is it monitors review sites. It will let you know when you get a review it will send out reviews. If you've got one you can import your customer database into the system and it will send out requests in that slow drip kind of format. If you import 500 customers, it won't send requests to all 500 of those customers at one time. It will send out 10 15 20, however many a day so that hopefully as people start responding you get that consistent flow of reviews back into the system. It works if you've got one location, it works if you've got multiple locations. There's a dashboard where you can quickly see how many reviews, response rate, open rate regarding emails. You can send reviews via text. I mentioned briefly earlier about a code like sending the code “Pizza” to number 12345 and what that does when using RocketReviews is it will send them a response with a link that they can tap right there from the text message to leave quick feedback. And then once they leave that feedback, they'll get a notification or get an email asking them to leave a review on these other sites on Facebook ,Google wherever else that you have these other review platforms where you have a presence. It's got reporting so you can look and see how you're doing as far as getting reviews. Are people opening your requests? Are people opening the emails? Are people responding? Are they clicking through to leave reviews on third-party sites?

When you make something like this part of your internal process it almost takes it completely out of your hands. Then as you add customers into your RocketReviews system, it does all the heavy lifting for you and sends out the requests. It notifies you when you get reviews. It directs the customer to leave the reviews and directs them in the right direction.

We've got a link on our website SEO rocket.com/RocketReviews. You can go there and read more about the system, what it does, you can schedule a free demo with us. That actually would be with me. I could be walking you through the system to show you how it works both from the customers perspective and from the business owners perspective so that you can see how RocketReviews can make asking for and getting reviews an easier process.

I know we covered a lot of information. So if you've had any questions and if put them in the chat, we can answer them. Now. If you haven't put them in the chat, you can go ahead and do that now and as they come in we can go over those as well because we think we've got a little bit of time here to answer some questions. So Angela if we've got any questions from from any of the attendees, let's go ahead and start answering some of those.