Hi guys,

I'm considering adding a service that would give you the ability to easily add online reviews to your social channels. I put together a short survey to gauge interest. Without writing a terribly long post, here's essentially how it would work. 

1. Send a company branded text to your customer once job is complete. 

2. If they're giving you a great review, they'll be redirected to a social channel of your choosing (Facebook, Google Reviews, Angies' List, HomeAdvisor, Yelp, etc.). 

3. They leave a review. Everybody is happy, and you're getting SEO juice from the reviews and your business grows.

4. If they're going to leave a mediocre or not so good review, they don't get redirected, the review is directed into a "hopper" that you have access to, where you can try and manage expectations.

Let me know what you think in the survey below. Thanks! 

Survey

As a consumer, I don't want to be redirected.

I've sent a pretty generic follow up asking for reviews and left a link to channels i was looking to promote. I found it on a small business forum, I had good success with it. People were very responsive, it washed a negative review I had on yelp that was near the top that I had a couple customers comment to me about. I haven't been consistent with it though.

You'd never know it's a redirect.  The steps work like this.

1. They give you a 5 star rating..
2. Once they do that, the system sees that they're happy and asks them if they'd like to give you a review on one of the selected channels (Google, Facebook, HomeAdvisor, Angies List) or whatever you pick.
3. They tap the logo of whatever channel they're most comfortable with and voila, they're giving a review.

In this way, you're not having to give them links to this or that...click the logo, leave a review.

They can do it without having an account and/or logging in?

This is where I was running into some issues, people not having a yelp account and even if they made one if they only had 1 or 2 reviews it was hidden as it was assumed to be fake I guess.

It's cool that people can review without signing up/in if the reviews stick.


The letter that I had was closer to- if there are any issues please let us know, if not please consider giving us a review. I had my wife send them out to every customer for a while. A podcast I listen to emphasizes treating everyone like they are going to review you on social media (The MFCEO Project), this put me in that mindset more. We live in a very connected World now.

Kind of like voting and not making a difference.

Why not receive all of the responses and post the good ones on your website with "Here are some of our customers' comments", saving the negative ones to use for improving your services?

I don't know how important it is to know whether it's a redirect, but if


Ok. How are they going to do that without a redirect, unless you tell them to copy and the review, open the site of their choosing, find .... see what I mean?

Isn't this obviously a redirect? I mean, they're not on Facebook, the tap a logo, they're on Facebook... seems blatantly like a redirect.

Posting reviews on your website is good for "social proof" but does zero for your Google ranking.   The point of the reviews is to use them to help boost your ranking in the search engines.

Also in deference to those who don't like long posts:
*This is dishonest, like the sponsored "science" where unfavorable results are buried in a bottom drawer somewhere.
*Honesty (as opposed to marketing) demands that we publish all reviews.
*It's probably good marketing. Yes, marketing involves telling less than the truth.
*If there's a negative review and that person knows ANY of our other clients, we'd better be ready to solve their problems. Are we that ready? With ALL customers? Including the guy who didn't want me to have the particulars of his internet account, but called me last Saturday night at 11:30 about an outage?

I think the disappearance of negative reviews that this seems to foster will just contribute to suspicions about what we do.

And what about the person who really wants to complain and tries to do so by giving a 5 out of 5 rating, making the system think it's a positive review, then proceeds to write how bad things were?

Understand, I didn't create/design the system.  I'm trying to figure out where the price point is at so I may be able to offer it to my clients at a good price.

But since you'd like a deeper dive, here's how it works.   When you send the text, a customer can choose between 1-5 stars.

When they click a 1 star (for example), they are asked to leave a review.  That review gets placed into a hopper, where you can then address any issues with the customer).

If they click 5 star (for example),  They are then shown a list of 1-6 icons..for example, Google, Facebook, Angie's List, Home Advisor, etc..

They select the icon that they're more comfortable with(or that you direct them to).

They type up a short review directly from their phone and it gets posted to the channel they selected.

Ok, so I can assume you're not interested.  Thanks for the response. 

Are you supposed to give the client a sob story on site about how they might receive a survey and only perfect scores count like I've heard several cable guys do?

It always seemed to me like if these guys tried as hard on their actual job as they do on the pitch they think they're so slick with, they'd be further ahead.


I also think that thinking you're going to fool people with push notifications then re-directs is more likely to piss people off, I haven't seen it in action but I can't really see how it adds any value for the client.


Why not follow up 2-4 weeks after the job to make sure everything is still going well and include an easy way to review from there? You might hear about some issues that you wouldn't have otherwise but this is where you win, showing you care.
You might also not get all 5's in this scenario either but if you're using it for SEO you should have more reviews and it'll give you a better idea of where people think you're at, they're talking anyway- to their neighbors, co-workers, people at the Country Club. You might as well get a realistic idea of what they're saying about you.

I immediately disregard reviews when they are ALL five star. You know for a fact they are filtered. Thats just wrong.

@RangerHome-  The reviews don't have to be all 5 stars. You can choose whichever level  the person would be able to send a review directly.  It's totally up to you.



That's a great idea...But I can't get any of you guys to do it.  Nobody follows up, nobody asks for reviews.  I thought this might serve a purpose, but I was clearly wrong.

For many of us, it is not always easy to keep up with all the things we "should" do when it comes to asking for reviews.
If you have a website and you are just sitting there hoping it is working for you, good luck with that. It takes time and effort to maintain a web presence, and one of the ways to keep you moving up the search engine ranks is to have things like reviews on other popular sites that link to yours.
I know I have to figure out more of this (or get Paul to help) for my site. I do get calls from people searching, not a lot, but some. Just have to keep at it.
We would rarely ask a client for a review if we did not think they were going to say something good, so having 5 stars should not be a negative. All we want is to have a few clients post a couple of things they liked about our work or service so others that may be searching have a general idea that we are pretty good at what we do.