Online Reviews

Online reviews for local businesses is extremely important, and will be increasingly so in the future for the simple reason:

Many consumers make their buying decisions based on reviews!

Reviews are becoming an increasingly prominent component of business listings in search results, and the public is using them to distinguish purported credibility based on them. This presents a significant problem for small businesses, since reviews are not easy to get. Most people simply do not take the time to leave reviews. Only a small percentage do.

What do businesses need?

Businesses need a stream of good reviews coming in! There is no question about this. Without a stream of good ones coming in regularly, a bad one can pop up and do significant damage to your online visibility and credibility.

What is the solution?

We offer the most creative, clever, and effective solution for this problem. It is an ingenious software system that runs continuously to generate feedback, testimonials, and reviews on major portals. Here is the basic sequence:

1. A customer (or a list of customers) are imported into the system with their first name, last name, and email address.
2. An email is sent to this person to ask for feedback about their business. (If a large list of customers is imported, the system can be set to send a certain number of emails per day.)
3. A customer receives the feedback request email, and click a button to go to the feedback page.
4. The customer is asked to do two things: move a slider between the numbers 1-10 based on how likely they’d be to recommend your business, and to leave text comments.
5. What happens next depends on the number where they move the slider! This is where it’s determined whether they seem to be happy, or unhappy, and it’s adjustable. For example, you can set that the number eight and higher means they are a happy customer.
   • If they are happy customer, they will receive another email that says, “thank you for your feedback, can you please leave a review on one of these major portals.” (Links are provided to your Google Plus page, Yelp profile, Facebook page, etc.)
   • if they are an unhappy customer, they receive another email with customer service language that you customize, such as, “were sorry you weren’t completely happy… We will try to address your issues, etc.”

That describes the sequence of how the system works, but there are many benefits. The text comments that they leave as feedback can be set to automatically appear on your website! You have complete control over which ones appear, and can set them to automatically appear based on the slider number. (For example, you can set it for every customer who gives a nine or higher on the slider to automatically have their comments appear on your website.) These comments appearing in a feed on your website are excellent for helping your website get conversions, as they show recent, happy customers. They also have genuine SEO value! They count as fresh content, and are formatted in the hReview format, which is recognizable to Google as reviews.

Like I mentioned, this is one of the most clever, creative, and effective solutions ever created for small businesses. One of the greatest values— which is not always promoted— is actually the negative feedback that can come in. The negative feedback will teach you things about your business that you did not know, and help you resolve problems that you might not have known that you had. It can help you repair a customer relationship, and also prevents a bad review that might have surfaced had you not communicated and dealt with the problem.

Some of the other benefits of the system are:

• Completely mobile friendly
• It has a “kiosk mode,” which allows you to personally ask for the feedback on a tablet or iPad in your office, or at a job site.
• It provides a URL that you can promote anywhere for people to go and leave feedback, which enters them into the full sequence of the system.

Let us know if you have more questions, or how we could help your business attain more online reviews.