It is easy to see HelpHound and its moderation as a simple means to an end. That 'end'? Harnessing genuine customer opinions to attract new business.
There is a clue in the word 'genuine'. Until recently, there were many ways to attract and display such opinions, all loosely gathered together under the heading 'social media'. Review sites - Yelp, Tustpilot, Feefo, X, Facebook, Instagram. Even TikTok and the likes of Reddit and Quora.
So what has changed?
Joe Public, or rather 'Joe Public with an axe to grind', has come to realise that these sites are highly unlikely to challenge anything he or she posts. This has led to many of these, in the main well-intentioned, sites hosting increasing amounts of content verging on - and in many cases not 'verging' at all - abusive content.
You will remember when you could innocently post something on Facebook, even a 'mild' political opinion, and get nothing but polite responses? Those days are well behind us now. The same goes for Instagram and TikTok, where the use of foul language seems to be all but obligatory. The review sites may take down posts using such language, but fake reviews, as well as factually inaccurate and intentionally malicious reviews, are so frequently posted as to be commonplace.
So, what used to be useful marketing avenues have become high-risk. Ten years ago, we routinely advised clients to re-post their reviews to social media. Now we are increasingly reluctant to advise any engagement whatsoever, outside of responses to reviews on Google (which are essential) or a select number of less influential review sites.
The importance of moderated reviews
This has brought our moderation - checking every single review for factual accuracy or the potential to mislead the reader pre-publication - into much sharper focus. What was once a 'nice to have' feature has become core.
Here is what Google's Gemini has to say about us today...
Let us highlight some key points from this remarkably accurate assessment of our service:
Pre-moderation: this is essential. Hard experience has taught us that once a comment is posted anywhere, from Google to Trustpilot to X, it is going to remain there. We conduct many appeals on behalf of clients, but success is a lottery at best. Misinformation has to be dealt with pre-publication
Compliance: just about every business - at least in the UK - that actively engages with reviews is currently breaking the law. Usually, by identifying (known as cherry-picking by the CMA) 'happy' customers and then only inviting them, and them alone, to post a review. So unnecessary when compliant review management has so many other benefits
'Hybrid Hosting': after every review is posted to the business's website, an automatic invitation is sent to enable the reviewer to copy their review to Google. Our most successful clients have a conversion rate of well over fifty per cent
Conflict resolution: this is an interesting one; HelpHound does not exist to prevent customers from airing genuine grievances or dissatisfaction (this would be against the law in the UK); this is made clear during moderation. What we do - in roughly one in twelve cases - is engage with both the business and the customer if we think the review contains factual inaccuracies or statements likely to mislead any future reader
And the comparison?
We couldn't have put it better. The 'Primary Goal' is key to everything we do here at helpHound: our clients, as Gemini has realised, are almost exclusively in the high-value professional and service sectors (as opposed to online retail, for instance), where a single well-crafted but factually incorrect review can do untold and lasting harm to a business. Often unfairly.
The reason so many of these kinds of businesses have yet to engage with reviews is not that they don't understand the power of a positive presence on Google to drive custom; it is the result of a well-founded fear that such engagement, unprotected, can do far more harm than good. And they are correct.
Leading in local search (in a very crowded marketplace), these 775 reviews are taken from the business's own reviews displayed on its website. These, in turn, feed into its Google score and reviews:
Their last one-star review was received over three years ago
HelpHound is that protection.
Further reading...
No more one-star reviews: how this business embraced review management in order to ensure a clean sheet, both on Google and with its own reviews on its website
The CMA begins its crackdown: if your business is one of the many currently hand-picking customers to invite to write a review, from Google to one of the review sites, you should read this today!
Our guarantee: it has been in place for over two years. How many clients have invoked it?
Readers, especially lately, may have gained the impression that we are not Trustpilot's No. 1 fan. So we thought we'd give you an example of where Trustpilot can be helpful. It's been highlighted by Google's Gemini AI in this recent article as well.
The example
You are shopping online. You know which product you want or need. But you are faced with a range of possible suppliers. Take this shampoo, for just one example...
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But, quite understandably, you want reassurance that the online retailer is reliable, so you conduct just one more quick search...
A score of 4.8 from nearly 1500 reviews. Job done. No need to mine down any further...
Confidence given. Purchase made.
And this is exactly what Google's Gemini is saying:
We concur. It may sound strange at first, but when we set out our stall as 'review managers' (not, you notice, a review site like Trustpilot or Yelp or any of the many others), we decided that it would be important for our clients to retain ownership of their reviews. After all, they are written by their customers, not HelpHound's, and we all know just how valuable that kind of data is these days.
You only have to look at any HelpHound client in competitive search to see just how great a) the social proof and b) the SEO kicker is; just look at this client in a Google search:
The scores - of the business's own reviews - pulled from their website by Google, just about every one fed through from the moderated reviews on their own site, enhancing the business's SEO and providing ample social proof...
Leading the Google Maps 3-pack and leading organic search for all the most popular searches (in a very crowded marketplace). Scoring 4.9 from over 600 reviews on Google, and just as importantly, scoring 4.9 from well over 700 moderated and verified customer reviews on HelpHound (it is those that provide the raw material for the Google reviews).
Gemini reinforces this point as well:
One further point bears repetition, which we have consistently hinted at, but never expressed quite as bluntly as Google: '[HelpHound] only generally work with businesses that demonstrate a commitment to high customer service standards.' Maybe strike the word 'generally'.
Talk about belt and braces. HelpHound's moderation has been key to achieving all of this.
Further reading
Moderation: how it gives complex high-value services the confidence to actively engage in reviews
Fees: comparable to Trustpilot's freemium model, we would only argue on the point of value added for our clients' businesses
Leading to 'The 'secret' impact' that HelpHound has on its client businesses
Compliance: of course, many businesses continue to look nearly as good as this by flouting the CMA regulations, particularly those against 'cherry-picking', but with the CMA currently on the warpath, surely it is no longer a risk worth running?
We asked Gemini the kind of question any sensible business owner or CMO might reasonably ask as a first step (we have intentionally avoided asking a leading question, to the extent of referencing Trustpilot before HelpHound)...
In summary
As you might imagine, it was tempting, at least initially, to annotate each paragraph and fight HelpHound's corner in every instance. But the more times we read Gemini's conclusions, the more we were inclined to leave them to stand on their own merit. The last paragraph, 'Strategic Tip', pretty well sums it all up. In our opinion, at least.
Why not go through the same process and substitute the vertical your business operates in for 'Wealth Management'? When you see Gemini's answer, make a list of any other questions you have, and we will be delighted to give you our own - non-AI - answers.
And, by the way, the only comparator Gemini has so far failed to pick up is our fee scale and our money-back guarantee.
Is there a day when we don't come across another wheeze? Look at this advertisement on the London Underground...
...and what do we see? 'The UK's most trusted major appliance group.' And four and a half green stars (it seems like it's always four and a half stars, doesn't it?). And this on the front page of their website:
As well as this:
So we did what almost no consumer ever does. We googled 'Hotpoint Trustpilot'.
This is the first result in the above search:
Over 30,000 reviews, rating Hotpoint 'Service' at 1.7 and 'Bad'.
So we looked some more. Back to Google. The second organic search result came up with this:
Again: over 30,000 reviews. But this time rating the business 'Excellent'. What on earth is going on? You might reasonably take the two listings at face value and make an assumption something along the lines of 'Hotpoint makes great appliances, but their after-sales service is awful'. But when we read some - actually quite a few - of the underlying reviews, a pattern began to emerge, but before we mine down into that, perhaps read these two summaries at the head of the two Trustpilot listings:
So which is it? We'll let you decide! Now on to the reviews themselves. We read a significant sample from both listings. Let's play a silly game for a second: it's called 'Guess Which Listing the Review was Written on'.
Review 1:
Review 2:
We will put you out of your misery straight away: Review 1 was written on the 'Hotpoint' listing; Review 2 was written on the 'Hotpoint Service' listing. So far, so 'alright - you cannot expect customers to understand the difference (or care, for that matter).' But look again, do you see the word 'invited' next to Janet's 5-star review? And do you see the words 'Unprompted review' underneath Colin White's review?
What is happening here?
There's a clue above: although the business has 'claimed' both Trustpilot profiles, they are only 'subscribed' - i.e. 'paying for' the one on the right.
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All the above could be forgiven for giving the impression that happy customers are asked to post a review on one listing, and unhappy (and far more motivated) customers are left to find their way to the other. This is backed up by our research into the content of the reviews themselves: almost all relate to 'service' rather than 'product' issues, on both listings, the only differentiator being that over 90% of the reviews on the 'Hotpoint' listing have been 'invited' by the business; we struggled to find a single 'invited' review on the 'Hotpoint Service' listing.
A reminder. Not written by us, but by Microsoft's Copilot - we agree with every word*
So, to answer our own question, any reasonable person looking at all of the above must surely come to the conclusion that the separate listings are solely to ensure that Hotpoint can have at least one to back up the rating used in all of its marketing.
Conclusion
In addition to the paragraph above, there is a wider issue here, and it is not confined to businesses such as Hotpoint. Marketing departments pay for review sites for a reason. That reason, all too often, has less to do with customer service and more to do with achieving a rating for use in the business's advertising and marketing. Review sites, and the CMA in the UK, have a duty, moral as well as legal, to protect consumers from being misled. Practices that manipulate reviews, in any way at all, innocently or not, must be stopped. If they are not, consumers will ultimately lose confidence in online reviews, and their considerable potential to aid decision-making will be forever lost.
*And it wouldn't be fair if we didn't ask Copilot what it thinks HelpHound is for:
We could spend a while and struggle to better this as well
Further reading
The CMA begins its online reviews crackdown: we have warned businesses time and again, over the years. The CMA has teeth, and it will use them; it's just a matter of 'when' and 'on which businesses' now.
But risking a fine and reputational damage is so unnecessary if you run a great business, however large or small, when there is a solution, proven over many years, that will give your marketing department what they crave, whilst at the same time ensuring you are not breaking the law.
As promised, the Competition & Markets Authority ('CMA') has begun its action to make reviews more useful for consumers, in a word: 'trustworthy'. They wouldn't use the word 'crackdown', but make no mistake: the CMA is responsible for the changes to the law last year and for the legal action that will follow if businesses persist in non-compliance.
Action to date
Regular readers will be familiar with the CMA code; it has been in effect for over 10 years and already bans selectively inviting reviews and gating (more on these two later). The CMA's latest move - on fake and incentivised reviews - is covered in this webinar...
...which you are welcome to watch. For those without the hour to spare, we summarise it here:
Businesses that invite, host or publish online reviews must
Take reasonable steps to ensure that the reviews are written by genuine customers
Not knowingly host fake reviews
Not knowingly host incentivised reviews without making it clear that the reviews in question were incentivised
Must not make the incentive conditional upon a positive review
HelpHound welcomes this and any action flowing from it in terms of enforcement. The CMA has already taken enforcement action against several businesses, and it has secured promises from the two biggest players in the reviews sphere, Google and Amazon, that significant resources will be put in place to detect and eliminate fake and incentivised reviews.
But the CMA acknowledges that this is just the beginning; it understands that, going forward, online reviews, relied on by so many consumers, must be reliable and genuine, and that they are not unfairly manipulated by businesses.
HelpHound's opinion on the above, and on the next steps we hope the CMA will take
This is a good first step. Fake reviews help no one, not even the business that may notionally benefit at first; they are too easy to identify and trace. If you have any doubts about this, please read Grizzly Research's recent report and see just how easily they identified fake reviews.
We would also like to see a complete ban on incentives. We consider that any incentive to write a review must come with a clear, if unspoken/unwritten, implication that the business in question is looking for a positive review.
Going Forward
As you might imagine, we have quite a shopping list. This is borne of years of hands-on experience of inviting, moderating and just plain reading online reviews; not to mention watching - intently - the evolution of various review platforms, from the giants of Google and Amazon, the specialists such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com and the trades-specific sites, to the generalist review sites such as Yelp and Trustpilot that set out their stalls to attract businesses, both large and small, with their own 'solutions'.
Here it is:
Concerns
This business has over 8 million customers in the UK, but just 32 reviews on Google
The same business has over 65,000 reviews on Trustpilot
1. That a significant proportion of 'big business' has learned that using (and by 'using' we generally mean 'paying') a third-party review website to invite and host reviews can 'wash' its reputation on Google and provide great marketing ammunition at the same time. Businesses will pay good money for the 'right' to post four and a half stars, no matter the colour.
Plain English: Invite all our customers to write their review to the XYZ review site, and they won't write a negative review where it really matters/hurts (because it will be significantly more visible): on Google.
HelpHound's suggested remedy: that businesses be made to answer a simple question: why do you not direct customers to Google? Where their reviews will be seen and read by the overwhelming majority of consumers and, wait for it, there is no charge!
Another large business's take on reviews. 'Why not Google?' we ask. The staff member's comment 37 seconds in is instructive.
2. Many businesses, often large quoted businesses, have realised that a customer review rating a short telephone conversation carries just as much weight, when it comes to calculating the business's crucial star rating as a review of a lifetime's experience of the same business.
More helpful to the business than its potential customers? Definitely
Plain English: some business's listings are flooded with such low-value reviews. Do they help consumers? We doubt that. Do they augment the business's headline score on the reviews site? Yes. If a business is asking for reviews by push text/SMS or a QR code it is generally proof positve that all they really want is the customer's rating; they are not interested in review content. Consumers, on the other hand, are extremely interested in valuable review content.
HelpHound's suggested remedy: that sites are made to insist, as 'X' aleady does, on a) a minimum numer of characters per review (140 will do to begin with) and to differentiate between reviews of the business itself and review of a minor interaction with an individual member of staff. No consumer needs half a million reviews of a business they are considering using. Quality must be prioritised over quantity.
Articles such as this abound on the web
An 'oldie but goodie'
3. That SMEs and many professional businesses are universally flouting the CMA regulations concerning cherry-picking.
Plain English: staff are routinely instructed - sometimes incentivised - to get nailed-on five-star reviews, and those only.
HelpHound's suggested remedy: Discipinary action by the CMA - fine plus publicity. It worked when estate agents were found to be illegally price-fixing back in 2017, it will certainly work again.
And it took us roughly ten seconds to find this
4. That a significant number of businesses are gating, commonly using e-questionnaires.
Plain English: nothing to add to the above.
HelpHound's suggested remedy: Discipinary action by the CMA - fine plus publicity.
Examples of businesses only showing glowing reviews on their websites abound
5. That a significant number of businesses are flouting the CMA regulations concerning publishing reviews: commonly by choosing to show selected five-star reviews on their websites.
Plain English: as above
HelpHound's suggested remedy: CMA fine plus publicity (perhaps a warning in the first instance).
Aside from the fact that we might not agree that a business rated at one or two stars by nearly a third of those who have reviewed it should be described as 'Great', this review site justifies scoring the business at 4.1 (Google and HelpHound and every other site on the web, would score it at 3.7!).
6. That some third-party websites are flouting the spirit of the regulations, at the very least, by favouring businesses that pay for their 'additional services'; an example: businesses that pay the third-party site to invite significant numbers of reviews over a given period have their score weighted in favour of recent reviews, meaning two businesses with the same number of reviews and/or the same individual review ratings, can recieve markedly different scores on these platforms.
Plain English: businesses that pay for add-ons - specifically the right to invite numbers of reviews per month - score significantly better than those that resist the review site's sales pitch.
HelpHound's suggested remedy: methods or scoring must be unified. Outliers such as Trustpilot must be made to conform the the norm (that norm being a purley arithmetical average as used by every other site on the planet)
This is the listing for a nationwide group of veterinary practices on Trustpilot. It scores 4.4 out of 5 from over 8,000 reviews. It is rated 'Excellent' by Trustpilot, Trustpilot's top rating for businesses. But let's do what we bet an infinitesimally small proportion of the business's potential customers/patients will ever do: click on the box to see the underlying percentages...
...and what do we see? That 35 per cent of those who have left a review (after being invited to do so by the business - a paying Trustpilot member) rate the service they and their pet received at just 1*. 'Excellent'? And its purely mathematical score if these numbers were on Google, or any other site? Just 3.4! If anyone reading this article agrees with Truspilot's description of this business as 'excellent' please leave a comment at the bottom of this article.
7. That review platforms use subjective terms to describe businesses; examples include 'excellent' and 'great'.
Plain English: would most reasonable people describe a veterinary practice where in excess of one in three reviews rate a business such as the one above as 'Excellent'? No. Of course they wouldn't, so nor should the review site.
HelpHound's suggested remedy: subjective descriptions such as these should simply be outlawed. Consumers are intelligent enough to make up their own minds if provided with the correct information and statistics.
Nearly 3,000 reviews of Trustpilot on Reviews.io
And nearly 400 reviews of Reviews.io on Trustpilot
8. That review platforms host many hundreds of questionable negative reviews of rival platforms on their sites.
Plain English: both common sense and experience dictate that the overwhelming majority of these reviews are of questionable origin: real people simply don't write reviews of review websites, certainly not in the volume you see above.
HelpHound's suggested remedy:moderation, again. Proper moderation would query just about every single one of the reviews posted on either of these sites.
Conclusion
The above describes 'phase two' of what we consider to be the CMA's priorities regarding online reviews. With over 90 per cent of consumers currently consulting reviews before purchasing goods or a service, it is critical that the manipulation of consumer opinions - by the review sites and the businesses - as detailed above is addressed, and speedily. It is also critical that a universal scoring system be imposed on all businesses and platforms: the current state of affairs, where a business can effectively pay to score far higher on one platform than it would on any other, is untenable.
Without such action, consumers will begin to lose faith in online reviews, which would be a great loss to all of us, both the business community and consumers. And before the inevitable cynics say 'No great loss', may we refer them to this single review amongst billions all over the web...
...you may not need reviews of your local McDonald's to be 100% reliable (although McDonald's would almost certainly like them to be), but medical practitioners, financial advisers, lawyers and other high-value services? We rest our case.
Let's paint the current picture: there are two kinds of business on Google:
The one that selectively invites its happiest customers to write a review
The business that avoids any proactive involvement with Google reviews
Actually, there is a third category, but we'll come to that later.
Category 1
Looking great, but...
...the pattern of reviews gives the game away: just 13 reviews in the last 12 months is a sure indicator that the business in question is hand-picking happy customers
We hear it all the time: 'We're forced to flout the CMA regulations, because all of our competitors do.' and/or: 'If we obeyed the CMA regulations and asked everyone for a review, our Google score would tumble.'
Category 2
A household name wealth manager with tens of thousands of clients
At the opposite end of the spectrum we hear 'We dare not invite reviews, because we wish to comply with the law, and if we do so, by inviting everyone to post a Google review we will open ourselves up to the kind of reputational harm that factually incorrect, potentially misleading or just plain unfair reviews will do to our business' from similar professional service businesses.
So, businesses are caught between the devil (flouting the CMA regulations) and the deep blue sea (not engaging at all). There are, of course, outliers: businesses that do invite all their customers to write Google reviews, but they are so rare that we have come across just a handful in over a decade.
So, back to the question posed in the title of this article:
How to be sure of not getting one-star Google reviews?
Adopt an independently moderated review management system.Moderation has proven, time and again, to resolve misunderstandings, errors or fact and just plain unfair reviews, before they are posted live anywhere, and certainly on to Google
Follow a disciplined approach to inviting customer reviews. Send an email - not a text (texts invite one-liners) - at an appropriate time. This establishes a valuable secondary communication channel that customers will use in preference to posting a one-star review on Google (or anywhere else)
Establish a review-centric culture among all management and staff. They should always be on the lookout for opportunities to prompt a review, and the most successful businesses invariably appoint a key member of staff to oversee the whole process and report results
The business that is the main subject of the article linked to above is an estate agency, an intensely competitive business operating in both the sales and lettings markets in London. The second is a women's healthcare medical practice in Harley Street. All of us know just how problematic the relationship between the various parties in such businesses and in such high-pressure interactions can be, and how often blame can be mistakenly apportioned (estate agency), and how reticent the GP's patients must be when it comes to 'going public' with a Google review. Yet the first business has gathered well over 500 Google reviews, in full compliance with the CMA regulations, without a single one-star Google review being posted in the last three years. The same applies to the Harley Street practice, although volume, as you might expect, is lower.
Our invitation to your business
Whichever category you currently fall under, come and test our guarantee. Your business will be in full compliance with the CMA regulations from day one, and the five-star Google reviews will begin rolling in within days.
Further reading
One aspect of review management that is not covered in this article is the positive financial impact: a great Google score backed by a significant number of reviews is proven, time and again, to make a positive impact on a business's bottom line. More enquiries and more conversions, it's as simple as that.
