Obtaining Reviews

[Laustin1878]

Im curious how you are advising your clients to obtain reviews from their customers. I believe a system needs to be implemented by the business owner and relayed to all employees who have customer contact.

What is your methodology? Do you have a script or training for your clients and their employees? I have been thinking of ideas and one thing I really like is how Amazon emails you 1 week or so after your purchase and reminds you about a week later if you have not submitted a review. This is great for when you get an email but what about for those businesses that do not communicate via email? I also believe linking from your contact us page or even the footer to a review site or two is a good idea.

What are your practices for obtaining reviews? I'm having trouble thinking outside of the box on this. It's one thing to request a review, it's another to actually encourage enough to get it. What is the trick?

 

[Marie Ysais]

Hi, I think you would benefit from checking out what Phil Rozek has on his website for customer reviews. In my opinion he has the best information out there on helping train your clients to get more reviews. He even has review handbooks and he breaks down each type of review for each social outlet. Phil wrote the book on getting client reviews in my opinion. Here is a link to his website for the review information: Products | LocalVisibilitySystem.com

 

[Phil Rozek]

Thanks, Marie!

Funny you should mention books (at least figuratively). I’m serving as the tech editor for a forthcoming book (Jan. 2014) all about reviews: Five Stars: Putting Online Reviews to Work for Your Business

It’s by the same gals who did SEO: An Hour a Day.

 

[Jon Hall]

First off, Marie is right: Phil is the master. We've certainly learned a lot from him here.

Second, you're right to surmise that effective review-getting goes beyond just asking customers for reviews. And it requires a commitment from your clients that goes beyond just deploying a tactic or buying a solution: Providing a great product or service is what ultimately motivates customers to leave favorable reviews.

Having surveyed all the review tactics and solutions out there (and having added one myself ), I can say that generally speaking, the best practice way to get honest reviews from real customers is to create some kind of "review funnel." You want to lead customers from their experience of a product or service to writing a review about it using whatever prompts, reminders and media make sense under the circumstances.

As you point out, many local businesses don't collect contact info, so an Amazon-style post-transaction email is impossible. We arm our clients instead with printed review "invites" that drive customers to a landing page online that helps them select a review site that we care about and complete a review (example landing page: Home | Write a Review ).



This approach puts a tangible reminder in the customer's hand, and frankly makes it easy for staff to be tactful--the card itself does most of the talking! Then, by driving the customers to one URL that we control, we can adjust which review sites we give "attention" to over time.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Jon
Thanks, but you must have a very generous definition of a ?master?

@All
Grade.us is a great tool. I did a write-up on it back in May, but Jon has added some nice features even since then.