New to HelpHound? Read on...

What is HelpHound?

HelpHound are review management consultants. That means we are experts on everything review-related and we provide a service to our clients that covers the whole spectrum:

•  software to gather reviews and display them on your own website (Dialogue™)
•  a mechanism to allow you to manage negative or misleading reviews in private (Resolution™), deflecting them away from public sites
• an automated invitation to enable your customers to get their reviews copied to Google (or other sites that matter to your business)
• advice on how best to invite reviews
• advice on how to respond to reviews - on your own site, on Google and on any other review site 
• advice on appealing negative reviews on Google and other review sites
• advice on how to train and motivate staff to embed reviews into their daily contact with their customers

If you would like to see what happens when a business joins HelpHound, just read this article.

Here's a memo we would hand you if we met in person, it describes various 'before and after' scenarios - all of which will apply to your business:

 Click to enlarge. If you would like a copy sent to your inbox, please email fiona.christie@helphound.com

What is HelpHound not? 

Helphound is emphatically not a review website. We believe that your customers opinions should belong to you, not an independent review site. We also firmly believe that the place your reviews need to be seen is on your own website and on Google - and once you have established a presence in those two places: on Facebook.

If I were to read three articles out of the hundreds on this blog, which ones would you recommend?

These will tell you most of what you need to know before you meet - or speak to - someone at HelpHound:

• The World of Reviews and Review Management - a good all-round primer
• Google review 3 years on - Google is so fundamentally important now - it has forced all the independent review sites into the darker recesses or off page 1 completely
• The Google Filter - this has been applied to hotels and restaurants since January 2016 and the roll-out across estate agents began this week. Essential reading if your business has less than 5 reviews on Google or scores less than 4.0

Oh - and for those of you who are considering linking to one of the independent sites - just one more: Independent Review Sites: Yesterday's answer to today's question - we have always had issues with sites that invite your customers to post reviews and then sell them back to the business - we coined the expression 'hostage site' - but we monitor them and report on them and have, on occasion, advised clients to use them (a good example of this is TripAdvisor - and why-oh-why won't they do more to cut down on fake reviews?).

How does HelpHound charge?

We make a one-off charge to design and implement your module into your own website. This varies from less than £100 for a standard 'off-the-shelf' module to more for special designs. We will always provide an accurate estimate before starting work on your own module.

After that we make a monthly charge for operating our software and moderating your reviews. This will usually be about £50 per month per location, often less - depending on review flows. This fee covers all our normal advice. For specialist advice and extra work we charge, like other professionals, an hourly fee. Again, we will always provide an estimate for such work in advance.

How should we judge the success of our HelpHound membership?

Professional review management should drive business to and through your door whilst enabling you to resolve consumer issues in private.