Can you incentivize staff to grow your reviews?

[darcycburk]

How do you all interpret this?

I’ve always recommended to incentivize staff, not customers, to get more reviews. It sounds like that is still ok, we just can’t instruct that staff to get a certain quota or to mention specific services/names. That’s how I read it anyway.

 

[keyserholiday]

I once heard Greg Gifford advice against incentivising staff to solicit reviews as it can back fire. Some businesses and employees can take this too far. A1 garage door services in Phoenix has 12,763 reviews. There is no need for any business to have this many Google reviews.

Google is removing and blocking reviews. If a business gets caught violating the TOS, Google can turn off the ability to get new reviews for 30 days and place a warning on the GBP.

 

[darcycburk]

I once heard Greg Gifford advice against incentivising staff to solicit reviews as it can back fire. Some businesses and employees can take this too far. A1 garage door services in Phoenix has 12,763 reviews. There is no need for any business to have this many Google reviews.

Google is removing and blocking reviews. If a business gets caught violating the TOS, Google can turn off the ability to get new reviews for 30 days and place a warning on the GBP.

I get that one could certainly take it too far. I question whether or not it is now a policy violation to do so based on this update. It seems to me like it is less about encouraging staff to solicit reviews and more about have staff pressure customers to leave reviews on the spot and with their name, such as restaurants often do.