This abuse has to stop

Ten weeks ago, we highlighted a product whose promoters were playing fast and loose with reviews. This week, marketing for a very similar product appeared on YouTube.

Take a look at these screen grabs:

This advertisement was shown on the Sun Online last week. So we, naturally, looked for reviews:

And this...

Ah! The gold standard that is every consumer's holy grail: a full five stars. But from where?

On a site called 'Toptested'. The difference being the reference to nearly 2,000 Trustpilot reviews, so we looked there too:

Surely some mistake? No. Just a blatantly fraudulent reference to Trustpilot and a fake score. All designed to shift cheap and virtually useless stock in as short a timeframe as possible. We predict that the product and the web page with the 5 product reviews will be gone within days.

Trustpilot, right? No. Trustpilot ratings are out of 5, or 5 stars, not 10. This is called 'passing off' in legal terms, meaning designing something to look so much like something else as to mislead a consumer.

These reviews are equally fraudulent. Almost certainly written by AI, but certainly not written by a bona-fide customer. The express intent is to support all the other fraudulent product marketing

And, just for good measure, go to YouTube and search 'pressure washer'. What do you see? This, by any chance, right at the top:

Who could resist? A pressure washer so powerful it doubles as a chainsaw?

And finally...

On your - and the UK consumer's - behalf, we ordered two of these miracle washers. One from Jetterix at £49 and one identical one from another Amazon-listed supplier at £9.99. Neither produced more pressure than the existing 'gun' on our garden hose. We consulted an engineer who told us straight away that the pressure in such a 'gun' was entirely reliant upon the pressure at the tap it was attached to. Without a motor, it could not possibly boost the pressure at all.

The issue we have

Aside from the obvious: that fraud is being perpetrated upon the UK consumer at scale, we are concerned at three aspects of this corrosive behaviour:

1. That these advertisements are being carried by major advertising channels: YouTube, Amazon. Google, Instagram and TikTok, and online legacy media such as national newspapers
2. That the regulators - Advertising Standards Authority in the case of patently fraudulent advertising and the Competition & Markets Authority in the case of misuse and passing off of reviews - do not appear to have yet sanctioned either the businesses behind the 'products' or the carriers of such advertising
3. That these fraudulent practices, if allowed to continue, will further undermine the public's confidence in reviews as a valuable mechanism for reassurance before purchasing goods and services

Bear in mind that these channels earn every time you view, click or buy (YouTube between 5 and 30 cents per view, Amazon from 5% to 40% of the purchase price, just for two examples).

Action

We will contact both the ASA and the CMA and let you know what they say, along with any action they intend to take.

'Platform decay' - how to prove your business isn't just yet another cash generator for its shareholders

Tech critic Corey Doctorow has a much less polite name for this. But we will leave the inquisitive amongst you to find that out for yourselves. What does 'Platform Decay' mean in the context of running a modern business?

Let us describe it in terms that we can all understand:

1.  The business invests heavily in sales and marketing to hook the customer

2.  The business provides excellent initial service, delivered by a human being 

3.  The business then degrades that service, usually by substituting tech for in-person service

Ring any bells? We thought so. Why do so many businesses end up at No. 3? The answer, besides 'pure greed' is 'because they can'. And they know they can. They have often invested heavily in researching just how impersonally they can deliver their 'personal service' before they begin to lose customers. The word they love most is 'inertia', being the degree to which a customer will tolerate poor service before they up sticks and change their financial adviser/lawyer/doctor.

Think of your last interaction with any of those. Was the phone answered within three rings by a human being? Was your request for an appointment agreed to at a time of your choosing? Was the information you requested provided in an intelligible format and in a timely manner?

If the answer to any of these is 'no', then you are a victim of 'Platform Decay'. If your business cannot answer 'yes' to all of them, it is part of the problem. 

Before someone says, 'we introduced our automated [any] service for the benefit of our customers,' let us be quite clear: given the option to speak to a 'real' person or a bot, no one, in the history of the world, opted for a bot. 'Oh, but it frees up our staff for more important tasks,' we hear someone say. Again, 'no'. Nothing is more important in a service business than personal contact. The tech should be on the business's end for the member of staff to use to provide the service the customer was 'sold' in step 1 above.

Imagine? technologically feasible, but would you prefer it to your local?

If you don't believe what we have written in the previous paragraph, take a face-to-face business that we all understand: the great British pub. Supposing some bright spark decided that your local could provide a far more efficient service if they did away with all the - expensive - bar staff and replaced them with a line of fully automated drinks dispensers. Just swipe your card, and a pint is poured for you. By a machine. Instantly. No queuing. No waving a twenty-pound note to attract attention. In fact, have a terminal and a feed at your table and have it done without you even having to get up and walk to the bar, sorry, 'dispenser'. 

Businesses that 'treat their customers like humans' get far better reviews, leading to far better scores (Google especially), which in turn leads to far greater numbers of inbound enquiries and a far higher rate of conversion. What is not to like?  

This is effectively what businesses that have introduced Platform Decay into their models have done. Now, this article has not been written to convince those businesses to change, far from it. We are writing it to show those businesses that do provide a great service, right through from inception to fulfilment and throughout the customer lifetime, that there is a way to show prospective customers that they still exist. And it's called 'reviews'.

It is pretty easy to spot a business suffering from Platform Decay. They have reviews such as this:

As opposed to those that don't, that have reviews such as this:

But there are also great businesses out there that continue to look like this:

...and this for a business with well over half a million customers

So, the answer is simple: if your business is not a victim of Platform Decay, you need to mobilise your customers to write reviews like the one written by 'Sid' above. 

Pointers:

1. Choose a moderated mechanism (so you don't have to worry about factually inaccurate or misleading reviews seeing the light of day)
2. Choose a compliant mechanism (now that the CMA is on the warpath, the days of cherry-picking happy customers and only inviting them to write a review are behind us)
3. Avoid using review sites (the example above of the business scoring a woeful 2.8 is one such - 26 Google reviews from over 500,000 customers is an extreme, but nonetheless valid, example; and the regulators in both the UK and Italy have taken action against, or are currently in the process of investigating, two of the most prominent review sites)
4. Engage all your management and staff ('Sid's review is one of over 600 on Google and nearly 800 on their own website, whence almost all of the Google reviews derive, for a single branch of an estate agency)

Further reading:

• Joining HelpHound - what happens next? Our latest update.

Joining Helphound - what happens next?

It's such an obvious question, but the answer - or 'answers' - often surprise people. First, let us look at the prime motivators for businesses to join:

1. They understand that reviews are important. That consumers - especially consumers of high-value services (financial, legal, medical and the like) - actively seek out credible reviews
2. They understand that scoring well and having critical mass in terms of the number of reviews on Google is the ultimate goal
3. They understand that legal compliance, in the context of the CMA regulations - once viewed as 'nice to have' - is now essential
4. They require their reviews to be moderated, to defend their businesses against factually inaccurate, potentially misleading or just plain 'unfair' reviews

Taken one at a time and expanded upon:

1.  The importance of reviews 

Statistics vary (don't they always?), but reliable sources all agree on one thing: consumers a) read reviews, and b) rely on them, especially when making important and potentially life-changing choices. Throughout this article, we will be referencing Google's AI (Gemini), simply because it performs an objective web search and includes links to follow* if you require more in-depth proof:

*to find and follow the links, simply repeat the search in the grey box at the head of each example.

Conclusion: reviews, especially Google reviews*, matter. All other factors being equal, the business with the higher Google score will attract more enquiries than businesses with lower scores and/or fewer reviews.

* Google hosts between 71 and 73 per cent of all business (as opposed to product) reviews; this compares with other sites as follows: 6 per cent for Yelp, 3 per cent for Facebook, and 3 per cent for Tripadvisor. The remaining 16 per cent is spread across hundreds of sites. Add to this the fact that Google reviews appear in every single search for a business name or category, and that, rightly, consumers attribute more credibility to Google reviews ('rightly' because Google knows the identities and search histories of all its review authors), then the core focus of any business's review management strategy must be Google reviews.

2.  Great Google scores (and number of reviews)

Conclusion: No real need to read past the first word: 'Yes'. We would also argue that for high-value service and professional businesses, the 'sweet spot' is higher. We aim to achieve a score of at least 4.8 for our clients, even if that means a complete audit and reassessment of their internal CRM. 

3.  Does the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the UK have teeth?

Conclusion: although we have always stressed the importance of compliance with the CMA regulations, up until this year, there was no concrete proof that the CMA was being proactive in enforcing its core regulations regarding reviews. All that changed with the passing of the Digital Marketing, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. This gave the CMA far wider powers of sanction against businesses where the following breaches were evident:

• Fake or otherwise fraudulent reviews (e.g. paying for positive reviews, encouraging staff or other connections to write reviews)

• Cherry-picking customers most likely to write a positive review, and then inviting only those to do so

• Gating (the practice of testing customer satisfaction - usually by a 'How did we do?' type of email or questionnaire - and then only inviting those who rate the business at 5* to write a review, to Google or anywhere else. There are even instances of businesses inviting reviews to a less visible reviews site and then inviting those who post a 5* review there to copy that review to Google

4.  Moderation: 

Few high-value or professional businesses are willing to expose themselves to unmoderated reviews. The reasons are obvious: they often provide complex services where outcomes are beyond the business's control (think legal, medical, or wealth management), making them vulnerable to factually incorrect or misleading reviews. There has to be a safety net. HelpHound's moderation is that safety net:

Conclusion: The above just about covers everything you need to know about how and why we moderate all our clients' reviews.

Now that we are all on the same page regarding the reasons for adopting professional review management, we can safely move on to the actual processes.

1.  The mechanics

Your web designers embed our software into your website (we will provide all they need), enabling your customers and other stakeholders to write a review directly to you:

The highlighted button above leads directly here:

This can be tailored to every business's brand image, and the questions (apart from 'overall opinion', which is mandatory) are likewise business-specific

The button has two effects: it ensures immediate compliance* with the CMA regulations - by ensuring that anyone can write a review of your business, and it is the key route to our moderation: every review written there will be read for factual accuracy or potentially misleading statements. An average of 7 in 100 reviews requires some interaction with the author of the review, sometimes on minor points of spelling and/or grammar and sometimes on more fundamental (and potentially harmful to the business) misconceptions. It may surprise some to know that in very few cases indeed does the reviewer not welcome our moderator's intervention. When one examines the reasoning, it is easy to understand: few people want to see their reviews publicly corrected (in the response by the business, on Google or elsewhere).

*Compliance does not exonerate a business from fault over past breaches, but our judgment is that the CMA is far more likely to initiate action against businesses that are currently non-compliant than against those guilty of historic breaches.

2. The invitation to your customer/patient/client, asking them to write their review

Again, there is no such thing as a 'standard' email template, but this will give you an idea of the kind of thing. Please note: We have well over a decade of experience with the response rates gained by varying email wording, so we strongly recommend using our recommended template, at least initially. 

That's it. It only remains for us to show you how to maximise review flow and show you a case history. The key to maximising review flow is to constantly 'warn' your customer just how much their review means to you, both personally and to your business, at every conceivable relevant touch point. A good example is when they pay you/your business/other members of staff a verbal compliment: just say, 'Please remember to say that when you come to write your review.'

As for a great case history: here's a business that started from as close to scratch as makes little difference:

And here it is today - on its own website:

In the crucial Google local search '[business type] in [location]':

Note: the number of reviews next to the five gold stars and the 4.9 rating - no, not Google reviews, the business's own reviews, pulled by the Google schema and shown in comparative searches

And the Google knowledge panel* (compare it with the one above):

*the Google Knowledge Panel: this is shown in every search on your business, and is the resource Google uses to access information about your business.

All the ingredients are in place:

• Great staff
• Great management
• Great processes
• The right reviews solution

 ...and the results are there for all to see.

One final, but no less important, note:

At HelpHound, like most modern businesses, we use software to enable us to deliver on our promise to clients, but our service doesn't end there. We pride ourselves on our personal contact with our clients and rarely does an hour go by without an inbound email or phone call asking us for specific advice, be that on drafting a response to a review, how to appeal a factually inaccurate review (on Google or anywhere else), or how to increase review flows; we are here to help, and to ensure that every single client of ours succeeds. 

The link above - 'our promise to clients' - shows exactly what your business can expect. Including guaranteed results. We look forward to being an integral part of your business's continued success.

Getting the reviews flowing

As you might expect, we have very wide experience of review flows, given different circumstances/business types and methods of approach. We will deal with all these and more in this article.

The process

This is the simplest part:

1. The business sends an email asking for the review
2. The review is posted to your website, having been moderated by HelpHound*
3. HelpHound sends an automatic email to the reviewer inviting them to copy their review to Google

If that is all the business does, they will see a response rate of +- 1.5 per cent.

Which may be fine for a business that completes many thousands of transactions a month (an online retailer, for example). Sell 500 shirts, get 7 reviews, sell 5,000 shirts, get 70 reviews:

All the reassurance a customer could ever need, right? Bearing in mind a large proportion will be repeat customers, and everyone knows how to return an unwanted purchase these days.

But what about high-value low-frequency services, the kind of business that HelpHound predominantly works for? Let's look a little closer at what we mean by 'high-value low-frequency'.

We mean the professional and other service businesses, from accountants to yacht brokers (we couldn't come up with one beginning with 'Z'), medical, legal and financial services. The kind you choose and hope to stay with for a lifetime, or the kind you need in an emergency, or once only (think 'estate agent'), but where the wrong choice will cost you dear, in more ways than one.

A medical practitioner, an accountant, a wealth manager or a solicitor may only have single figures of touch points - a 'touch point' being where it would be appropriate to ask for a review - per month. A single branch of an estate agency is unlikely to have dozens. 

So let us look at the aims, lessons, and strategies that will ensure your business succeeds.*

* 'Guaranteed success'? Absolutely. Read more about our guarantee and fee scales here.

Aims

• To turn your existing customers into your most valuable marketing advocates

• To achieve a score of 4.9 on your website and on Google

• To get high-quality reviews*

• To get a steady flow of fresh reviews

• To get 500+ reviews in both locations, then 1,000, and so on

*'High quality': we have tested every possible means of acquiring this kind of extremely valuable review (see above). The kind that can convince a potential customer to pick up the phone or visit a business's website all on its own. They typically contain details of the customer's requirement before contacting the reviewed business, and then more details on how the business fulfilled their requirements. Not just the 'great business' type of review elicited by text/SMS.

Lessons learned

• Do not use text/SMS to invite the review. You will get a lower response rate and will be sure to get far less detailed (and therefore less helpful) reviews. Always invite reviews by email 

• Do not ask for reviews to be completed in your place of work; firstly, it puts undue pressure on the customer, and secondly, Google have been known to arbitrarily delete all or some of the reviews for a business where it sees multiple reviews from the same IP address 

• The wording of the email inviting the review is critical. It must be tailored to every single business, and sometimes to every discrete service offered by that business. The focus of the email should be on the benefits the review will bring to future customers, not the business

• Invitations to write a review out of the blue (with no warning) achieve a far lower conversion rate, and are generally of a far lower quality as well. 'Warn' customers that they will be asked to write a review, and reinforce how helpful future customers will find their review, as often as possible. If a customer pays a verbal compliment, be sure to ask them to remember to include it when the time comes to write their review

• Set targets. Easily achievable at first, and then ramped up as staff become increasingly practised at achieving them. It should be eminently possible to achieve reviews on your own website from half of your customers, and half of them copied onwards to Google

• Appoint members of management and staff to drive your review management. Integrate it into everyone's daily routine

• Reward members of staff, by team or individually, for achieving target numbers of reviews. Consider rewarding staff for every review they achieve**

**Do not incentivise customers to write reviews. Ever. It is against many review sites' T&Cs and flies in the face of the spirit of the CMA's regulations. Providing incentives or rewards for writing positive reviews is illegal.

Strategy

This client had 3 Google reviews and none of their own when they joined. They have developed a strategy, in conjunction with HelpHound, that has produced the results you see here. Above is their website. Below is what they look like in the critical Google local search:

And here they are, leading organic search (all in a very competitive marketplace):

The red arrow is pointing at the score that Google has pulled from the business's own reviews, not their Google reviews. We thought this aspect of our service was a 'useful addition' to our core service until a Google update temporarily switched it off; the howls of anguish from clients who valued it as much as anything else we do for them echoed around the office. Luckily, it proved to be a very temporary glitch

We tailor a strategy for every single one of our clients (no one-size-fits-all at HelpHound), and we will liaise with your marketing and web team to dovetail your review feed with your overall brand and web design.

Longevity

We will ensure that the strategy we recommend endures. Review management is a long-term commitment bringing benefits all the way along the journey. But many of those benefits will be apparent from day 1. Full compliance with the CMA regulations from Day 1, reviews flowing from Month 1.

Here's a memo that clients of HelpHound will immediately recognise. It is now well over ten years since it was first issued, and guess what? It is as relevant today as it ever was.

Here's another - more recent - version of the invitation email*:

*We always recommend that new clients run with a version of this email - tailored, naturally, to their own particular business - for two reasons: firstly, because this email format has been tried and tested over the years, and secondly, so we can eliminate the email as a cause in the event of lower-than-expected response rates.

Important note:

The above email invites the review to the business's own website only. This allows HelpHound to moderate every review (an average of 7 in every 100 reviews will involve some intervention by our moderators), in order to allow the reviewer to correct factual inaccuracies or potentially misleading statements***. Only after the review is published on the business's website will the reviewer be asked, automatically, by HelpHound, to copy their review to Google. If you look carefully at the example of Winkworth above, you will see just how successfully we - 'we' meaning the management and staff of their office in conjunction with HelpHound's software and advice - have been in converting a very high proportion of the reviews written to their website into Google reviews. 760 reviews to their website, resulting in 570 Google reviews.

***The wording here is precise. Our moderation is not designed to deflect honestly held opinions; by law, a consumer must be allowed to publish whatever review he or she wants, but in our long experience, the vast majority welcome our service: few actually wish to see inaccurate or misleading comments under their name, and therefore welcome our service. The result? Accurate and helpful reviews. For all concerned.

When clients are established and confident with their procedures and our mechanism, we often recommend they convert to what we call a 'Multi' invitation: inviting reviews to both their own website and Google at the same time.

Trustpilot in the regulatory crosshairs

The AGCM - the Italian equivalent of the UK's Competition & Markets Authority - has fined Trustpilot EU 4 million as '[the] Online review platform provided consumer rating information not always representative of customers’ actual experiences.'

The ACGM's press statement is here. An extremely thorough English translation of the detailed findings of the Italian investigation is to be found here. 

In this post, we have taken extracts from both of these and made our own comments where necessary. 

The above is a summary press statement by the AGCM.

What follows is a translation and summary of the key findings by a European law firm.

Our comment

Overall

We continue to ask the question of any business subscribing to Trustpilot - or any other online review website - 'Why?'

• 'Why pay [a review site] when Google reviews are free?'

• 'Why pay [a review site] when Google reviews have far higher visibility?'

• 'Why pay [a review site] when Google reviews have greater credibility?'

We contend, as we always have, that if Google reviews had predated the online review sites, the latter would never have come into existence. 

Not covered by the above

Trustpilot's use of a 'Bayesian average' to calculate a business's 'Trustscore'. Here is what Google Gemini has to say on the topic...

The issue here can be broken down into 'Simple' and 'More complex':

Simple

Work this out if you can. We spent hours wondering how a business with 77 per cent of its reviews scoring it four or five stars could possibly result in a 'Trustscore' of 1.6, and couldn't come close to finding an answer

Most - all? - consumers will expect a score to be a mathematical average (as is the case with Google reviews and just about every other mechanism we have ever come across, including our own): the business has ten reviews scoring 5.0 = an overall score of 5.0. Not with Trustpilot, partly because of the seeding referred to above. All businesses start with a score of 3.5. The kind of score that will have most consumers moving swiftly on (to the next business). 

More complex

Click to read. Does anyone else think this sounds like 'Join and look great'?

Add to the above the fact that Trustpilot also applies a (positive) weighting to more recent reviews, and the water is muddied even further. This obviously benefits larger businesses and those that actively invite reviews from customers, which may just mean 'paying business members' (the ACGM evidently thinks so).

Overall

Some might say that all of the above work in favour of paying subscribers and against businesses that haven't joined Trustpilot. Certainly, Grizzly Research's examples, comparing similar businesses, some members and some not, give the distinct impression that 'join Trustpilot and look great, don't join and look terrible.'

The key here is two 't' words: 'Trust' and 'Transparency'. Reviews are relied on by the overwhelming majority of consumers these days to guide them toward reliable businesses. If businesses are offered an opportunity to tip the scales in their favour and that results in consumers being misled into using a business they might not otherwise use, it erodes trust. 

Tell us that a review such as this is not gold-dust? For all concerned: the business and those researching the business

We often hear people saying 'I don't trust reviews' or 'I wouldn't use reviews', and that is probably acceptable in the context of online shopping, but when it comes to choosing a medical, financial or legal adviser, it would be a great pity if the vital resource that online reviews can be was unable to be trusted.