Dave’s Certified Reviews–Complete Management of Your Reviews
Dave’s Certified Reviews has been established for small businesses, to allow the busy small business owner to manage her on-line reviews effectively, gaining valuable customer feedback, responding to reviews, and tracking the progress of the review management effort, in just minutes a day.
The previous page, How to Manage Your Reviews, talked about how you can manage your reviews yourself, without any special tools for the job. You can certainly do it, but this is not something that a small business person wants to get involved in. The time spent in lots of repetitious Google searches can better be spent with other aspects of your business. You need to be able to do the important parts of review management–responding to reviews and tracking your progress–in just moments.
That is exactly the purpose of Dave’s Certified Reviews. Based on ten years of Web marketing experience with small businesses, the whole process is constructed so that it works for the person who is running a small business, and has lots to do, but needs to manage reviews confidently.
The whole cycle of review management is supported:
- acquire favorable reviews
- provide a feedback method for customers who aren’t happy
- respond to reviews
- track your review campaign
- display favorable reviews on your Web site
- correct directory site listings
Acquire Reviews
The method you use for review acquisition must be tailored carefully to how your business interacts with its customers. Because of this need, a wide variety of methods for acquiring reviews are provided. They are all based on the same basic principle: first, ask the customer for feedback on performance of the business. If the response to the request is neutral or negative, then the customer is asked to provide feedback that goes only to the company. If the response is quite favorable, then the customer is asked to write a review and is presented with an array of buttons that take the customer directly to the right page on various review sites to enter a review.
You can use a tablet computer to collect customer email addresses, say, at the cash register or in a waiting room; a personal email from you is then sent to that email address that’s been provided and the customer is asked to provide feedback and is taken through the cycle described above.
You can add a small graphic to the bottom of emails that are sent to customers in the routine course of business. The customer clicks on one to five stars; a click on one to three stars gives them a request for feedback, while click on for five stars sets them up to write a review.
We can provide business card sized requests for customers to provide feedback on how the business is doing. These cards can have scannable QR codes that will take the customer right to a webpage that will let them make that first choice of 1 to 5 stars that starts the review acquisition cycle.
If you have an email list of all of your customers, we can send them a personal email from you, from your own email address, asking for feedback about how the business is performing. We can send those emails in what’s called a drip fashion, some number of emails per day, typically 10 or 20. Using this approach, the reviews do not arrive at the review site all at once.
If you have the ability to send an email to a customer after an interaction with your business, such as checking out of a hotel or rental residence, or making a purchase, then the email facility is excellent for asking for review immediately after a customer has just dealt with your business. Asking for feedback immediately following a business interaction is a great way to get details about customer reactions to your business that you might not learn otherwise.
Provide a Feedback Method for Unhappy Customers
Every business has unhappy customers, and so does yours. Of course, the goal is to have as few of them as possible. We will set up a complete review funnel mechanism for you, that will get you feedback from unhappy customers (that you can have directed to anyone else in your business, in addition to or instead of you), before they have a chance to write an unfavorable review. This approach can provide you with information about how customers perceive your business that can be more valuable than the reviews. It can allow you to spot problems that limit your business that you would otherwise not have learned about.
Respond to Reviews
The easiest way for you to respond in a timely fashion to customer reviews is to furnish you an email notification as soon as we detect the review, and then give you a link that you can use to respond to it. That’s exactly what we do.
You don’t have to search over and over to find out whether you’ve received any new reviews. An email appears in your inbox from your review manager showing you the new review that you’ve received and providing you a link to click to respond to it. If you want to delegate the follow-up to someone else in your organization is easy at this time to simply forward that email to someone else and asked them to take over.
You can have these notifications sent to several different email addresses in your organization as you choose. This allows you to see copies of all the reviews that your business receives, while delegating action on them to someone else in your organization.
Along with the notification of new reviews, you’ll also be notified when a customer has checked the neutral or unfavorable rating, and has chosen to give you direct feedback on the performance of your business, and has not been asked to do a review. These notifications provide you an excellent opportunity to learn how your business may be providing less than the best customer satisfaction in some circumstances. They also provide you an opportunity to follow up individually and remedy the situations.
Track Your Review Campaign
The goal of your review campaign is to increase the number of reviews you have and improve your overall average score on your reviews.
A single potential customer who is reading reviews of your business will likely read them on just one or two review sites, and will not see the entire collection of reviews that you’ve received. Therefore, while you might have a very high average score on your reviews, it’s important as well to assure that there aren’t any specific review sites where your reviews are much less favorable than the average.
The monthly reporting that you receive shows you the new reviews that you’ve received during the month, your overall average score on all of your reviews, and your average score on the reviews you have on each review site. At Dave’s Certified Reviews, we also use these scores to continue tuning your review campaign. If we find that you have lower average scores at some review sites we will emphasize those sites in our solicitations for reviews.
Display Reviews on Your Web Site
Prospects who have begun their search for a business by reading reviews on review sites won’t have seen all your favorable reviews, they’ll usually have seen them on just one or two sites. Once you have a lot of reviews from many sites, displaying them on your Web site puts together a convincing argument, from a multitude of sources, why a prospect should do business with you.
In addition, customers writing reviews tend to use the language of customers to talk about your business and your offerings, giving you lots of good content that uses just the words that other prospects use in their own searches. So having lots of good reviews and displaying them on your site will help your search rankings.
It’s important that this display of reviews be up-to-date. You don’t want a prospect to see that the latest review you’ve posted is, say, a year old. Immediately the question arises: didn’t they get any favorable reviews in the last year? DCR will provide your Webmaster with a link that will display your most current reviews on a page on your Web site. Each of these will display the first part of the review, along with a link to the original review site, so that the reader can see the review on the review site.
Correct Directory Site Listings
Another service that’s included in Dave’s Certified Reviews deals with your businesses listings in online directories. There are slightly over 40 online directories that are the most popular and most influential. Many of these are simply directories that don’t post reviews. Nevertheless, it’s important that your business be listed correctly, so that someone who wants to get in touch with your business will get a correct address and phone number and website URL from the business directory.
During your first two months using Dave’s certified reviews, we will contact these 40 significant directories and correct your listings. Not all of these directories always respond correctly to our requests, so we can’t guarantee that all of them will be corrected. Typically there are one or two of the local directories that for some internal reason don’t properly respond to our requests, and may still list you incorrectly after our work. We are usually successful in correcting your listings in more than 90% of the online business directories of significance.