Chapter 4

Monitoring and Learning from Your Reviews

The best review monitoring process has a bit of jiujitsu in it: You need to deftly sidestep information overload, sweep aside emotional reactions, and efficiently gather wisdom from your reviews to improve your business. Here, you’ll find practical advice for choosing which review venues deserve the bulk of your attention, how to keep track of your online reviews, and most important, how to incorporate what you learn from your reviews into your business practices, products, and policies.

In this chapter:

• Why monitor reviews?
• Review monitoring for best results
• Review monitoring tools
• Learn from your reviews

Why Monitor Reviews?

Consider the following real scenarios that illustrate common business concerns. A medical professional we know who had never given a moment’s thought to Yelp was taken aback when a new patient asked him why his Yelp reviews were so bad. A resort owner we’ve worked with knows that TripAdvisor is delivering more reservations than her website but doesn’t know whether that’s a problem or an opportunity. Another destination client of ours has found strong complaints in their online reviews but lacks a functioning process to get that information into the hands of people who can address the problems that are driving the complaints. Establishing a business routine that includes monitoring and learning from reviews would help each of these businesses in different but powerful ways:

You need to create processes to regularly monitor online reviews and translate your findings into customer service, marketing, and product improvements. Doing so may require a culture shift; for example, if your business has always run using the boss’s gut-based decisions (“I know what’s right for my business. Who are they to tell me what to do?”), removing emotion and establishing a meticulous data tally may help to make the case for change. It may also require you to put some thought into resource allocation. Far from being the sole dominion of your CEO or community manager, monitoring and alerting activities could be a good fit for any motivated soul in the marketing department or anyone on your team who has customer contact and knows your offering well, from a customer service specialist to a receptionist or greeter.

Businesses with a small number of reviews can work with a low-cost, mostly do-it-yourself method for keeping a handle on online reviews. We’ve included exercises in this chapter to get you started on this path. A larger enterprise may have too many reviews for a manual approach. Larger retailers, chains, manufacturers, and brands can benefit from a review tracking tool that provides alerts, summaries, and integrations with other business systems.

Review Monitoring for Best Results

A solid review monitoring process involves getting into a habit of looking in the right places and identifying actionable feedback. Your own process will fit your unique business needs and resources, but should include these components:

Your review platform or monitoring tools may significantly simplify this process. For example, some tools provide customizable alerts and allow you to visualize trends and sentiment and take actions with a few clicks. But even if it’s just you, a browser, and a spreadsheet, you’ve got a winning combination: These are the only tools you’ll need to complete the sample review monitoring exercise in this chapter.

Review Monitoring Tools

By now you know there are many venues that can display reviews of your business or products. Reviews can be found on third-party review sites, on search engines, within social media, on your own site, or on the sites of vendors who sell your products. Review monitoring tools can help businesses make sense of all of this information. Table 4-1 lists several tools and resources, including free and paid options, to get you started on your path to better understanding your reviews. Let’s start with a quick roundup of some features to look for in review monitoring tools, ranging from basic to advanced:

• Sending alerts when reviews come in
• Providing measurement and analysis tools
• Providing a platform for following up and taking action on reviews
• Finding and aggregating reviews from multiple sources
• Providing views of the data that are tailored for different roles within the company
• Benchmarking your status among competitors
• Comparing between multiple locations of your business or retailers who sell your product

Here’s an overview of review tracking products that may be useful for your business:

Figure 4-1: Angie’s List reviews dashboard for businesses.

Figure 4-2: Revinate dashboard

Figure 4-3: BrandsEye social media monitoring

Table 4-1: Review monitoring tools

Prices for social media listening tools range from under $50 per month all the way up to if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it. Most have packages in the $500- to $1000-per-month range.

Figure 4-4: Demandforce’s review monitoring dashboard

Exercise: Know Which Review Venues Deserve Your Attention

Dedicating proper attention to every possible place where your business or products can be reviewed would take more hours than there are in a day, so we’re going to make this simple for you, with four assignments for identifying the venues that matter most to you.

First, we describe a method that you can use to find your most visible reviews for your business in Google. After that, we break it down into specialized tasks, one for brick-and-mortar businesses (or any business with a Google+ Local listing) and one for online merchants. Finally, we help you find additional venues to consider based on where your competitors are.

Google Search Results for Your Branded Terms

Your first task is one you’re already familiar with: Googling your own name. This exercise applies to any type of business. Here’s the assignment in bite-sized steps:

Step 1: Remove personalization from your Google results.

Google search results are personalized based on the searcher’s location, previous search behavior, and social profile. This can cause you to see wildly different results than your neighbors. If you’re logged into Google you can easily turn off some personalization by clicking on the globe icon in the upper-right corner of Google’s search screen. If you don’t have a Google account or you’re not logged in, visit www.google.com/history/optout, and click on the link “Disable customizations based on search activity,” as seen here:

This will set a cookie preference to display depersonalized results.

Another way to remove personalization is by using incognito browsing mode. It’s simple and will make you feel like a superspy. In Chrome, click File ⇒ New Incognito Window.

In Firefox and Internet Explorer, press Ctrl+Shift+P to enable private browsing.

These exercises are Google-centric because Google is vastly dominant in the worldwide search market. If you have reason to think your target audience is using a different search engine, use it instead.

Step 2: Locate yourself.

When you perform a search, the location of your computer affects Google’s search results, so you’ll want to perform the search with settings that match your business’s target audience. Google bases the location on your computer’s IP address, but you can override this (perhaps not with 100% accuracy) by clicking the Search Tools button near the top of the Google search pane and entering a city and state.

E-commerce businesses or brands that sell to any location don’t need to worry about geographical settings. Businesses with an international customer base should perform these searches on all of the international Google sites that apply—for example, Google.de for Germany and Google.co.uk for UK—and should set the location to a city in the chosen country.

Step 3: Choose your branded search keywords.

In search engine optimization (SEO) lingo, search queries that include your business name are called branded searches. The branded terms you document today should include the following at a minimum: your business name, including all spelling variations; major product names; your personal name, if it is strongly tied to the business; and your business name or product name plus the word reviews.

You’ll also want to include any related keywords that Google Suggest shows you. Google Suggest provides suggested search terms as you type based on common queries. Type your business name with a space after it and check to see if Google adds anything. If you find autocomplete text for your business, go ahead and perform those searches and document the top page results. Feeling ambitious? Type your business name, a space, and then a random letter to see what other suggestions you can find.

Step 4: Perform your branded searches on Google.

An example of Google branded search results is shown here:

Snap a screenshot of the top page results in Google. You may see some bad reviews or upsetting reputation blotches along the way. Try not to get sidetracked on these, but do document them so you can go back and obsess over them later.

Since you’re already on a review venue finding trip, any business with a physical location should take a quick detour to GetListed.org to see if this free tool serves up any other review venues that are getting a lot of action.

Step 5: List the review venues that you see in the results you’ve collected.

With the first four steps complete, you should have collected five or six screenshots showing top Google results. Now, look through those sheets and tally up any review sites that you see. To identify review sites, look for stars in the Google listings, or telltale titles that indicate customer reviews. Click through on any sites that you don’t recognize to see if there are any reviews there. Sites with zero reviews, or with just one crusty review from 2009 or so, probably don’t belong on your list, but use your judgment and add them if they convey any form of extreme sentiment, or if they are legitimate sites that are well targeted to your customers.

If you have more than five sites on your list, keep the ones that you found the most often. If you don’t find any review sites, be sure to pay close attention during the step called “Where Your Competitors Are,” because you’ll likely identify some good venues for pursuing new reviews.

A dermatologist may end up with a list that looks something like this:

• Google+ Local
• Healthgrades.com
• Vitals.com
• Yelp.com
• Wellness.com
• Insiderpages.com

Well done! You have a starter list of review venues that deserve the majority of your attention.

Your Google+ Local Listing

Your second task is to find the reviews that are displayed on, or linked from, the Google+ Local listing for your business. Not every business will have a Google+ Local listing, so this assignment only applies to those of you with a physical presence. Here’s what to do:

• Step 1: Click on “Maps” in Google and then search for your business name.
• Step 2: Click on “more info” to reach your business’s Google+ Local page

• Step 3: Scroll down and look at the reviews. Reviews that were posted directly on Google will include text, like this one:

• Step 4: Continue scrolling down and look for links to reviews on external sites:

Simple enough. Here is this restaurant’s list from the second task:

• Yahoo.com
• Urbanspoon.com
• CenterStageChicago.com

Your E-Commerce Seller Ratings on Google

This task is just for those of you who have e-commerce sites and are advertising on Google AdWords (www.google.com/adwords) or promoting your products via Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) (www.google.com/ads/shopping). As you learned in Chapter 2, “The Online Reviews Landscape,” Google pulls in seller ratings from various review sources on the Web. We’ll go into more detail on seller ratings in Chapter 8, “Showing Off and Being Found.” In this task, you’ll find the sites from which Google is pulling your reviews.

Step 1: Navigate to Google’s seller ratings page for your site.

There are a few ways to get to Google’s page showing reviews of your e-commerce site. If you have seller rating review stars on AdWords ads for your site, just click on the link next to them in your ad. In this example, CoffeeForLess.com would click on “44 seller reviews”:

If your site hasn’t been graced with star-spangled ads, here’s another way to see your ratings: Visit Google Shopping at www.google.com/shopping and search for a product that you sell. You will need to be running Google PLAs for your products to show up in this search. Click the Compare Prices button.

Then, click on the ratings link next to your store name:

Step 2: Make a note of the review sources Google is using.

Now, you should be looking at a page that contains reviews and a list of sources:

In the case of CoffeeForLess.com, the seller reviews are being sourced primarily from Bizrate and Google Wallet, with Epinions, PriceGrabber.com, and Trustpilot contributing some as well.

Where Your Competitors Are

The tasks you just performed gave insight into sites where your business or products have already been reviewed. For your next assignment, you’ll look for the venues where your competitors are listed.

• Choose three or four competitors. If your company doesn’t have direct competitors, choose other businesses that are similar to yours.
• For each of the competitors, go back and rerun the tasks you just completed, but this time, do it for your competitors’ branded names, and if applicable, their Google+ Local listing and Google seller ratings. Compare the list to the one you compiled for your business. Did you find any new sites that aren’t on the list?

As an example, suppose you run a limo service in Oklahoma City and one of your competitors is Royal Limousine Services. Their Google+ Local page shows five Google reviews and also includes links to Superpages, Local.com, and Citysearch. You’ve already got Local.com and Citysearch on your list, but Superpages—that’s a new one. Add it to your list now.

With your assignments completed, you’ve got a solid list of the review venues that matter the most for your business.

Keep this list at the ready as you learn more about monitoring and encouraging reviews for your business in Chapter 5, “How to Get More Reviews.” We hope you won’t need to use this list for crisis management, but if you do, you’ll find some helpful advice in Chapter 7, “Navigating Negative Reviews.”

Learn from Your Reviews

Learning from your reviews and taking action to change the problems at your business that are triggering negative reviews is a crucial element of any review management plan. Some businesses use sophisticated tools to sift through their reviews and parse out meaningful information from the resulting mountain of data, as we described earlier in the sidebar “Brands Learn from Big Data with Bazaarvoice.” But even if you do not have access to these tools, you can still take a manual approach using the best semantic analysis tool there is: your own brain.

An Honest Assessment

Your first step in learning from your reviews is understanding their content. If you’ve been obsessing over a single negative review for the last two years, or if you get so many reviews you have trouble keeping up, you need a way to get an actionable summary. Even if you think you already know everything about your reviews, using a formal process to tally them may cause unexpected patterns to emerge.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach here, so we won’t tell you exactly how to do it. The ultimate goal is the same for all businesses: Look through your reviews on the venues that matter to you and identify and quantify the positive and negative mentions of your business, product, or services. For example, a restaurant might develop a simple tally like this:

Logging the sentiment in your reviews can be difficult if you feel a negative remark is unfair or incorrect. We recommend including all reviews in this assessment and remaining as objective as possible. Many businesses, upon performing an assessment like this, will notice a handful of concerns rising to the surface. Fair or not, these need to be addressed.

Taking Action

Once you develop an assessment of your reviews, you’ll probably see some familiar complaints and compliments. You may also see some surprises. Here are a few ways to frame your thinking around these findings:

• Look for easy wins. Are there any specific, easily remedied problems (“the waiting room is too cold”) that came up more than once? Why not jump on making that change right now? And don’t forget: If the review venue allows it, it’s almost always a good idea to respond to these reviewers and let them—and anyone else who’s reading—know you’re listening.
• Any complaints that show up in multiple reviews deserve your attention, but for large or difficult changes, review sentiment will be just one of many factors that inform your business decisions. If you can’t fix the problem right now, what can you do to improve upon it? For example, you may not be able to shorten your wait time, but can you think of ways to make the wait time more pleasant for your customers?
• Has a member of your staff been complimented, either by name or by role (“the concierge was so helpful!”)? Figure out a way to acknowledge, or even reward, staff members who get recognition in online reviews.
• Can you incorporate your findings into your business processes on a regular basis? A monthly meeting or weekly write-up might do the trick. Connecting with your staff about online reviews also gives them a chance to tell you about offline complaints and compliments so that you can compare notes and identify high-priority concerns.
• One simple action you can take is responding to reviews. This doesn’t have to be too time-consuming. As an example, the Revinate tool has a template feature that allows hotels to compose and store boilerplate responses to common remarks such as compliments on customer service. Obviously, you don’t want to publish repetitive responses to multiple reviewers, but having starter text at the ready will help you maintain a cohesive voice and keep responses consistent with your company policies. (Pssst…you don’t need a tool to create your own customer response templates!)

Even if your business uses more sophisticated review tracking tools, ultimately it’s this kind of human analysis that garners meaning and points you toward business changes. You know your business, you know your customers, and you know what changes are possible in the short and long term. That’s a trifecta no sentiment analysis algorithm can beat.

Now that you have a better understanding of the reviews you’ve got, let’s work on getting more and better reviews. See you in Chapter 5!