Customer Feedback and Review System Platforms
Date: May 5, 2018Category: Author: Kaycie Smith
As a follow up to my article written about the new Google review guidelines, I wanted to speak a bit about the use of review-generating programs. Popular review software programs include: BirdEye, Lighthouse 360, GetFiveStars, Smile Reminder, and Podium. While no mention was made in Google’s new guidelines about these programs, they have raised many questions about these paid for review services.
All of them solicit reviews by email. The office provides an email address for a patient and, after their appointment, the software generates an email asking for a review and providing a link to one or more review platforms. Sometimes there is a follow-up email repeating the request.
Does this violate Google’s new guideline that prohibits the bulk solicitation of reviews? Most commentators feel that they don’t, though there is room for question about that. But there are some cases where some of these programs have run afoul of guidelines. Let me mention two specific examples.
Lost Reviews With BirdEye
In November, I noticed that several clients lost large numbers of reviews on Google during the time frame of July 12th-Oct 11th. After spending hours investigating what happened, I realized that the one common factor was that these clients were all using the BirdEye platform. After consulting with a Local SEO Pro forum, it appeared that I was the first to make the connection and many discussions and articles followed. I also got a response from BirdEye’s “VP of Customer Happiness” which attributed the loss of the reviews to a “bug in the workflow.” (By the way, in the linked article, the comment about the BirdEye connection came from me, and I was also the source for the quote from their VP.) Further investigation by me and others, however, seemed to indicate that there could have been more issues. I believe that the main issue Google had with BirdEye was that they were trying to filter out negative reviews. They would send an email to the customer asking for feedback on their customer experience. Only those customers who had a positive report were sent the follow-up email with a link to leave a Google review. This is called a sentiment email, and this filtering tactic has been used by several reviews-soliciting programs.
BirdEye has since changed this policy, and this past week I received an email from them that included this statement:
“BirdEye has updated the review template and settings to comply with Google review policy. Businesses will no longer have the option to pre-check customer sentiment in their review requests. Instead, all of their customers will have the option to write a review on the review site of their choice.”
Yelp
Yelp has always taken a hard line approach against review solicitation in any form and has even publicly admonished businesses that have been found guilty of violating this policy. Yelps review policy can be found here and states: “Don’t Ask for Reviews- Period!” There is more to it but this says it all. Yelp does not want you to ask for, pay for, or solicit reviews in any way shape or form. 
They go even further to say, “Yelp does not want businesses to ask their customers to write reviews and our recommendation software actively targets reviews that have been solicited.” So the question is, will that Yelp software target reviews that come in through these review software programs? Currently, they won’t allow BirdEye or other platforms to include links to Yelp.
Future Concerns Surrounding These Review Platforms
As reviews have become even more important to small businesses, so has the need and desire to obtain them. There are two important things to know about reviews. One is that patients rely on them. At Infinity Dental Web, we are constantly surveying patients to ask them if they are checking reviews. The percentage of patients who check reviews before asking for an appointment has been rising in the past few years and is now up to two-thirds. The other is that reviews are becoming a ranking factor for the Google local search algorithm. How many reviews your practice has affects your ranking, and what patients say in those reviews influences how you rank for the procedures that they mention.
We wonder if the tightening of the review guidelines is a glimpse into the future for Google. Will these platforms even be allowed moving forward? Will there be an updated review algorithm that filters any review that was placed using one of the above services? We can only speculate and time will tell. It would be a shame to see some of these software companies fall victim to the future of review guidelines. I for one feel that consumers need a little help finding where to place reviews and a reminder is okay, too. Consumers are smart enough to read through the review minutiae and formulate an opinion. Prior to these software programs, I also think Google was hard pressed to get consumers to leave a review. I feel 2018 will prove to be an important year for Google and their review policies.
Kaycie Smith is a Managing Director at Infinity Dental Web.
When these review-generating software programs first came onto the scene, I was a big fan of them, but since then I have become much more cautious. I try to put myself in the shoes of Google, Facebook, and other review platforms and I can’t help but think they don’t like dentists using them to pump up their online reviews and thus are trying to figure out ways to detect and defeat them. So I worry that down the road, this is going to happen. If I were in practice today, my preference would be to just ask my patients for reviews and not use any of these systems.