Customers put a high value on online reviews of business products and services. Businesses should also sit up and take notice.
Now that’s a lot easier.
GatherUp has launched a service called Google Review Attributes Monitoring. A business owner could call it a reputation management solution.
GatherUp gathers customer feedback and reviews in one place, which can bring in customers while it strengthens the business’s marketing techniques.
GatherUp Google Review Attributes Monitoring
“GatherUp has long believed that reviews are more than the sum of their parts,” said Mike Blumenthal, co-founder of GatherUp. “And that reviews exist within a rich framework that can help a business in so many ways.”
Details in a review can help a business understand specific areas that need improvement, Blumenthal said.
How Google Review Attributes Monitoring Works
Google is offering review detail content in its reviews. GatherUP is the first company to aggregate the rich review content and present it to a business.
The information is gathered and organized so that a business can use it for management decisions, competitive analysis and marketing. The information can help a business define weak spots or strengths.
“We bring all this rich information into a dashboard and allow a business to search and sort it in a range of different ways,” Blumenthal said. “Want to know how many times someone mentions a strength or weakness? GatherUp can answer that question in a flash.”
“With our export feature, this rich data can be brought into Excel to gain more insights,” he added. “Which location is the most professional? Which location is the most responsive? What time of year do we experience more specific issues?”
How Detailed Reviews Help Businesses Grow
Let’s make up an example. A customer answers a standard post-purchase survey question that reads something like this: “How happy were you with the customer service you received during your visit?” On a scale of one to five, the customer selects the midpoint, three.
What does that tell the business owner or potential client? Not much. A rich review expands to include more effective operational measurements. These include descriptions such as quality, value, professional, clean, on time and responsive. These descriptions can be given a positive or negative value.
“Reviews have been good for marketing but not very good for operational improvements,” Blumenthal said. “But if you have fixed metrics in 4 or 5 areas, that can create operational measurements so that over time, the business can assess whether they are improving or getting worse.”
“Equally interesting is that this can provide a business with a fixed value for them to compare themselves to their competitors,” he added. “Are they more or less punctual? Are they perceived as more or less clean? That can provide great motivation for a business to fix things.”
Blumenthal said that such information can be used as a marketing technique. For example, a business may learn that its “responsiveness” is frequently highlighted by customers. They can add content to their website highlighting that competitive advantage.
Google’s Review Attributes Expanded
Google review attributes have expanded its menu of included categories. Customers could find options to express their reviews in sentences. They could respond to questions such as “What did you like about this place?”
Last fall, Google expanded its review attributes service to include businesses such as home services, lawyers, accountants, salon owners and more.
“It gives users new ways to understand and choose a business, and Google does want to do what is best for the searcher,” Blumenthal said. “It will allow them to pick between several businesses.”
“Those businesses may be bunched together with a similar review score on a topic that matters most to the user,” he explained. “Do they care about punctuality or value more?”
A user may type “inexpensive car insurance” as a search. Google can better answer that question using reviews that rate Value as very positive.
Blumenthal explained that Google provides different features for different industries. Some get products as an option, some get services. In the past, those industries were broadly covered as “Other Services” or “Professional/Technical Services. Now, there are specific categories for various businesses and industries.
How Google Asks for Attributes
Google Search asks the reviewer for attributes. When the customer leaves an attribute, he are she is presented with an opportunity to expand the review, based on the value that was chosen.
For example, if a customer leaves a 4 or 5-star rating, the customer will be asked “What did you like about this business?” The customer then chooses from a list of positive attributes, such as good quality, good value, professional and responsive.
In the case of in-home service providers, customers can also rate “timeliness.” A review that branches in various categories allow customers to make a distinction between businesses which each has a 4-star rating.
The customers can also add more information in their own words. For example, after giving a high rating to “Professionalism” a customer could add, “It was a great experience. The customer service person was knowledgeable and respectful.”
GatherUp’s Role
“GatherUP will make that customer experience the backbone of your business,” Blumenthal said. “This will help you build a continuous cycle of happy customers and powerful reviews, to help you capture your next customer.”
Image: gatherup.com
This article, “GatherUp Helps Businesses Gather Google Review Info” was first published on Small Business Trends