For businesses, the preponderance of online reviews can be either a blessing or a curse. Of course, businesses that don’t have many reviews, or that don’t have very positive reviews, are put at a competitive disadvantage to companies that have accumulated numerous five-star raves.

Crucially, however, there is much that businesses can do to make sure their own review portfolio teems with goodness. Review generation services provide an opportunity to gather positive feedback on the sites that matter most to consumers, whether that’s Google, Facebook, or Yelp.

Review Services: How Does it Work?

At enCOMPASS, we’ve partnered with a third-party vendor to provide our clients with seamless review services services. We have already seen these services generate significant benefits on behalf of our customers, allowing them to gather more reviews, use those reviews to build trust, and ultimately leverage that trust into increased sales. (According to our vendor partner, companies that use their review services service see an eight percent increase in sales revenues within just half a year.)

So how does review services work? Essentially, it provides our clients with the tools they need not only to increase their number of online reviews, but also to manage those reviews and to promote them in such a way that they really add luster to the brand.

Generating New Reviews

The first step in the process is simply getting more people to leave their feedback for your products or services.

The program that we offer here at enCOMPASS provides prompts for satisfied customers to submit a review; these prompts arrive via SMS, through in-store kiosks, and through your company’s website and social media profiles.

It’s worth noting that fabricating reviews is a major taboo in marketing circles, and indeed, Google’s algorithms are pretty good at sniffing out and discrediting fraudulent reviews. As such, the enCOMPASS program generates reviews by reaching out to actual customers and prompting them to offer feedback.

These reviews may be posted to any number of sites (our platform supports more than 150), meaning they’ll populate the directories or online review sites that matter most to you and your customers.

Managing Reviews

Review generation is really just the first step in the process. It’s also important to know when reviews start pouring in, and to have a basic sense of what customers are saying about your company. And it’s ideal to respond to reviews in a timely, effective manner.

Again, the platform we offer can help. It offers automated alerts, letting you know when customers are writing something about your business or your products. It offers automated options for responding to reviews as they come in, expressing gratitude for kind words and providing customer service to customers who are less than satisfied.

Note that these responses can be crucial: They show your customers that you really care about what they have to say, that you listen to feedback, and that you’re there to make things right as needed. The upshot of all this is a significant improvement in loyalty to your brand.

Using Your Reviews

The final step in the process is actually putting your reviews to good use… not just letting them accumulate but using them to drive sales.

There are a number of ways business owners can do this:

• Share reviews via your social media channels. Our platform has a way to automate this, meaning you can share reviews with zero effort.
• Incorporate reviews onto your business website. Again, there is a widget that makes this simple and easy.
• Add star ratings to your Google Ads, building social proof into your search marketing efforts.

These are just a few of the ways in which a robust review services plan can help you use the feedback left by customers to build a stronger online reputation, and ultimately to generate new sales opportunities.

Learn More About Online Review Services

Business owners cannot neglect online reviews. Statistics show that more than nine out of 10 customers are more likely to purchase a product if they can read online reviews beforehand. Thankfully, there are some good, automated tools you can use to gather these reviews, respond to them, and use them effectively.

At enCOMPASS, we make these features available to our clients and help them develop a process to build their reviews and help them develop a powerful presence on the Internet. If you have any questions about how review services works, feel free to reach out at any time.