Emily: Hello everybody. Welcome to A 5-Star State of Mind. We are going to let everyone hop on the call for a couple of minutes here, so just hang with me as people filter in. A little bit of housekeeping. We will have plenty of time today for live Q and A. So if you actually take your cursor right now to the bottom of the square where you’re seeing my slides and myself, a little toolbar should pop up. There’s a button that looks like two overlapping bubbles. It’s labeled Q and A, and you can use that to message with us. I have a colleague on the line, Caitlin. She’ll be following that Q and A box while I’m presenting and then we’ll use it for the last 15 or so minutes to do live questions.
You also can change how you’re hearing the presentation, so if you’re having any issues with your computer or if you’re going to be walking around, you can bring your mouse to where the little listening button is. It should be the button to the far left, can click that arrow and select the dial-in option and it’ll give you a phone number you can call from your phone and listen and then watch on the screen if that’s better for you.
I’m super, super excited about today’s presentation. It’s the first time in 2023 that we’re doing A 5-Star State of Mind webinar. This is one of my favorite topics, so I’m really excited to do this with you all today. Just want to give everyone another minute or so to hop on and then we will dig into the details. All right, let me do that housekeeping one more time and we will hop into our presentation. For those of you who just joined, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be with us today. If you take your cursor to the bottom of the screen where you’re seeing my slides and my head, you should have a little toolbar that pops up. The main button that you want to be looking for is the button labeled Q and A. It’s two overlapping chat bubbles.
My colleague, Caitlin will be monitoring that while I’m presenting, and then for the last 10 or 15 minutes or so, we’ll do live Q and A. So you can type questions in there as I’m presenting or you can wait until the end and I’ll be looking there to continue the conversation and dig into what you care about most. I think we’re ready to rock and roll. Let’s dive right in. Thank you again for joining us today. My name’s Emily Washcovick. I’ve been with Yelp since 2014 and I work as our Local Business Expert as well as the Host of Yelp’s podcast in partnership with Entrepreneur Magazine called Behind the Review.
My job at Yelp is to educate business owners predominantly on the free tools available to make the most of their presence on Yelp, and a lot of that is surrounding how they handle review engagement, and so we came up with this presentation a few years ago and have been modifying it and changing it over time. We actually have a new study that just released at the end of last year and I’m so excited to dig into some of those numbers with you all as we talk about reputation management today. I wanted to share my email address there for you. As I said, I’ve been working for Yelp for just over eight years now and I share that email every time I present, so it is known by thousands and thousands. You’ll not be a stranger if you drop in my inbox today, a week from now in a couple of months. I always say if I’m not the right person at Yelp, I will certainly connect you to the person who is, so jot that down. We’ll also include it in your follow-up email.
Do not be shy. I hope that you all feel like you can reach out to me after this presentation if you do have any questions. One more little plug from Behind the Review. This has been a passion project of mine throughout the pandemic. Every week we feature about a 15 to 25-minute episode and you’ll hear a conversation with a business owner as well as someone who wrote them a Yelp review, really giving that perspective of people running their operations and growing their business as well as the people being consumers and then going back online to share those experiences. So if you’re interested in that, hearing more of that firsthand experience from those operators, certainly check it out and if you want to be on the show or you think your business or brand should be on the show, shoot me a note. We would love to get the process started and see if you’re a good fit.
All right. Today’s entire theme is all about having a great online reputation and I’m of the firm belief that every business can with the right mentality and what we’re going to dig into today is what you can do strategically as well as things you can shift in your mindset that will help you manage this online reputation, engage with it, and actually look beyond just those star ratings, but actually at the content of your reviews and use them as operational feedback as well as a marketing tool and a marketing tactic. To set the stage a little bit, let’s just talk about review sites in general. I want you to ask yourself, when was the last time you may be referenced to review to make a decision? And again, not just on Yelp, I’m talking about all different types of platforms that we use every day.
About five years ago, I ran the Chicago Marathon, a one and done kind of marathon person myself, but I lost about two hours of my life on Amazon reading reviews for long distance running socks. It felt like such an important decision and if others had gone before me, I wanted to know what they had to say. And this really speaks to the evolution we’ve all been through the past 15 or so years to where reviews were something we knew about before and now they’re something we reference frequently before making buying decisions and we trust them. I love the statistic about how consumers trust reviews just as much or more than a referral from a friend. When I moved around the country to start working for Yelp, I didn’t have my parents or aunts and uncles to ask for recommendations when I was looking for a doctor or a mechanic.
And so going to online review sites was a great way to get that information. And this last statistic here on the far right about consumers trusting reviews with written text really just plays into how you want to engage with your online reviews and where to focus some of that time and attention, knowing that consumers are paying attention to those text reviews, but even knowing that consumers aren’t really always turning to review sites just for the reviews. Many of them are going to check or confirm hours. Maybe they want to set expectations of what your business is going to be like, what does it look like on the outside when they approach it? What’s the ambiance on the inside? These are the types of things that consumers are looking for when they turn to online review sites. And so when you think about your business’ online reputation, we want to think about this holistically.
We want to think about all of the information that you can add as a business to be found and to help people understand who you are and what you offer. And then we also want to talk about the review content as well. On Yelp in particular, we sometimes have the misconception that Yelp users are college kids looking for a slice of pizza for example. That really is not the case. 70% of our users are over the age of 35, and we see consumers who have already determined they have a need for something, they have the budget for it, they just don’t know who to spend that money with. And so by being present and being engaged and active in that platform, you are meeting customers when they’re lower in the funnel, they’re closer to making that transactional decision. And I know we have a lot of different industries represented on the call today, so I wanted to just give a little insight here as well.
Some people think, “Oh, consumers just turn to Yelp for restaurant reviews.” Well, I mean, sure, we all eat three times a day. We hopefully only need to get our roof repaired or maybe look for a new gym ever so often. So the search volume in food is sometimes higher. But you can see here there is immense search across all industries on Yelp, and really that’s been built up over time as consumers trust with Yelp has built, and the way people review things has evolved as well. So certainly do not count yourself out on sites like Yelp or other review sites if you’re not a restaurant or food business. And as many of you probably know, by having a great presence on Yelp, you’re reaching consumers beyond the ones who turn to Yelp immediately. Apple Maps as an example, pulls Yelp data, Yahoo, Bing, those are all pulling Yelp data as well.
And you can see some of these other platform partners where if a consumer goes to do a search there, like through Amazon Alexa, what they’re going to be given as options is the information and content on Yelp pages. So we need to make sure that we have a solid presence on those Yelp pages. Sorry about that. Clicked forward one too far. So we’re at this little standing point here where I’m going to make you think of which road you’re going to go down. Regardless, we’re going to give you some high level strategies of how to maximize your listing presence and then we’ll be digging into that review response strategy. But as large scale brands, as multi-location businesses, you have to look at your Yelp profile in two different ways. There’s the option, that’s the free option, and this is true for all Yelp listings, whether it’s a single location all the way up to multi-location, each individual listing can be managed on a free level and claimed individually.
Now, when you do this, and let’s say you’re operating this way and managing at the local level, you’re going to want the person logging in to use a generic location email. And the reason for that is because if that manager or operator leaves, you want to still have access to that if you’re not doing our corporate partnership. So the one downside there as a multi-location business to the free option is the fact that you have all these different logins per location and you want to make sure that those aren’t in individual person. They’re actually still managed at the company level. Over on the corporate ownership side of things, this is our paid option for multi-location businesses. Some of the benefits here include centralized single login. So if there’s a marketing director for example, handling, looking across all the review locations and maybe a local operator as well, you can have that single login with multiple location management.
You can also have multiple users on any of those locations. So if you have a regional manager for example, they can handle their seven or eight locations on one single login. The other major benefit here is going to be that bulk upload service. So many of you probably have business descriptions or photos and images that could apply to all locations, and then you might have those localized services or offerings or the inside of a brick and mortar looks different in a different location. With bulk uploading, you have the capability to work with our team and they take care of the listing management across the board, getting those accurate addresses, hours, getting photos included. So keep that in mind as you’re looking through how you’re going to progress forward with claiming and managing your pages. If we’re doing that individual location management, we’re going to start by going to business.yelp.com.
This is where you’re going to claim a page at a new location. It’s where you’re going to update hours. It’s where you’re also going to reply to reviews if you’re doing it at that single login. So business.yelp.com. We have a ton of other features on that page as well, but the homepage is going to allow you to log into the account. If that corporate oversight management sounds more your speed or is something you want to explore after today’s webinar, check out brands.yelp.com. It’s a new website. It’s really beautifully built and it gives you multiple options to connect with our team. We know some of you are going to want to talk on the phone, some of you might be able to send an email now and connect later. Maybe you want to chat live on the website chat. Whatever works best for you, go to brands.yelp.com and you will get in the system.
Our team would love to talk with you and they’re happy that you came to today’s webinar, so do not be shy in reaching out. They’ll know what you’re talking about if you reference today’s programming. All right, so regardless of if you are logging in on individual locations or if you’re having our team help with that bulk upload, these are the things I want you to focus on in addition to managing and responding to those reviews. The first is going to be business information. By the way, this is what it looks like if you were to log in on desktop to business.yelp.com or to your single stream login. You’re going to see the graph of activity for that particular location, and this left-hand navigator is going to be the toolbar where you go into different areas of your page to make modifications or changes. When we talk about the basic business information, this is where that bulk upload and the paid service can be beneficial.
When you have hundreds or even dozens of locations, this tedious content information being accurate across listings can be a really challenging feat. But if you are doing it through bulk upload or on your own, either way, we need to focus in on these key things. The name needs to be set up in a name format that works, especially if you’re a multi-location. So think of a lens crafters as an example. We would want to do the name and then some sort of location indication, whether it’s the neighborhood or however you identify that location. We want to label it appropriately on Yelp. When you’re working with our team, they can help you figure out the best naming, labeling and the classification. I also want to slide over here to categories. I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the fact that you can be in up to three categories on Yelp. So when you’re setting up those pages, consider the different customers you serve.
Let me give you an example. If I’m an Italian restaurant, but I also have TVs and a bar that would be Italian and Sports Bar, two very different consumers, but I can serve them both. And so those categories are going to help reach all of those types of customers. If you’re a real estate company for example, and you also do mortgage services, those would be separate categories where you can service both of those consumers.
The next section is going to be hours, and this is also extremely important. A lot of people search Yelp by open now or open at a specific time. If you do not have hours listed, you will not show up in those search results. So make sure you have your general hours filled out. And then on Yelp, you can do special hours as far in the future as you would like. So that means if you set a calendar reminder, for example, to update the business hours every month or every quarter or twice a year, you can go in, indicate those future hours and when those dates arrive, your Yelp page will be indicating its special hours at that time and reflect what those new hours are.
The other thing that I want to talk about briefly here is the additional information. If you’re working with our team, they can help you come up with this section and what you want to write, but as a basic direction and how I tell my local business owners to fill it out, is think of the key services and offerings you provide that you want to be known for. If there’s something niche that you do or something that really sets you apart, this is the area to incorporate that. And the keyword words and phrases you use here will impact how you appear in search results.
So think that through if you’re providing certain services or offerings, and again, if you’re working with that corporate oversight, they can certainly help you fill this out. This is also a great area to make it customized to different locations if you have a community element or something about that specific location that you want to indicate as different or unique. Photos are going to be the last area of info before we dig into those reviews, and I have to tell you, I’ve always irked on the importance of photos, but this new study that we released at the end of last year proved the point even further for me. 47% of respondents say they trust a business more when they have photos. And some of you probably have a lot of consumer uploaded photos. That’s awesome. It’s great when your customers do that for you. But what you still want to do is upload a set of photos, I say a minimum of 10, and use the photo caption feature because those captions help you appear in search as well.
Particularly if you are a restaurant or a food business, you want to show those menu items. If you’re a home provider or in the health and medical field, you want to show the different things that you offer and maybe what those services look like or what they can expect. Here’s some inspiration for the kinds of images to include. I’ll just repeat it again, really. If the service industry that you do doesn’t feel photo worthy the same way maybe juicy food photos do remind yourself that if I’m going to Yelp to search for a plumber or a gym or an auto mechanic, I want to see those types of images. So I know you probably already have them on your phone or as a marketing director, you have a whole Rolodex that you’ve been using for your digital presence. Get those up on Yelp and label them with a little bit of strategy behind the keywords that you’re including there.
All right, my favorite part of the presentation, we’re going to dig into reviews now. And remember, the reason we talked about all that stuff as a precursor to reviews is because it’s equally important when it comes to being found. And particularly for many of you, when someone sees your brand, they might already know you or have heard about you from someone. And so getting that accurate information in front of them brings them closer to that transaction. Before we get into the review section, I always make everyone pause and think for a second. Do we embrace customer feedback? And I think there’s a distinct difference between being okay getting feedback and criticism in person and feeling like it’s unfair for a customer to go directly online. I know a lot of business owners and managers feel like, “Why didn’t you tell us in person?” And I get that, but I think we’re really missing a whole opportunity when we become more obsessed with the stars and the star rating as opposed to the consumer experience and making sure that our consumers are getting the experience we want them to have.
So many business owners tell me, “You know Emily, I don’t pay attention to my reviews because people just go online when they want to complain”, and I have to tell them, “Okay, sometimes, sure, but on Yelp, we have more five-star reviews than one, two, and three-star reviews combined.” So overwhelmingly, people are turning to Yelp to share the places that they love. And at the end of the day, while your feeling about a critical review can be really personal and it can honestly consume you sometimes that it happened and getting it down is such a thing that we focus on when in reality, critical reviews actually build a little bit of consumer trust. And we’ll dig into what the study found with that specifically in a minute. But I want to highlight this book by Jay Baer. For all my readers out there, this is a must.
He says you have to answer every complaint in every channel every time. And you know what? As a multi-location business, woo, that’s overwhelming. I mean, even running a 10 location business and having to answer every complaint in every channel every time is a lot. Before I worked at Yelp, I was a front office manager of a Marriott hotel. We had 298 rooms and I was in charge of our online reviews on online platforms and through Marriott. It was wild. It was overwhelming. But you know what? In 2023, you all can put systems in place and use a little bit of planned strategy to accomplish this.
And when you’re asking yourself, “Well, why am I doing this? Why am I putting all this time and effort in? Is it going to have an impact?” It is, and it’s going to have an impact because we’re not just worrying about responding, we’re listening. We’re gathering information and data from the people who are spending money with us, essentially giving us eyes and ears in the business when we can’t be there. And then by responding, we’re gaining consumer trust. And honestly, I didn’t think that in 2023, responding would still make you stand out as much as it does, but it does. You have a huge opportunity to make people associate your brand with great customer service simply by having a plan and strategy to respond.
And at the end of the day, many of you know word of mouth is your main marketing funnel and always has been, right? Reviews are word of mouth amplified. Reviews are people saying what they think about you, to everyone, to people they don’t even know. And so I want you to think of it by responding as an opportunity to join that dialogue and essentially market yourself in a way that sometimes is hard to achieve. Someone else is saying something great about you and you’re going to hop on it, or someone is sharing a criticism and by responding, you are reflecting your customer service practices to all future consumers. Now, before we talk about how you’re going to actually respond and strategically respond, depending on the type of review, we have to really remind ourselves that at the end of the day, the biggest way to influence five-star reviews and getting more of them, is by having great customer service in person by creating these great experiences.
Many of you got into the business or industry you’re in because you care about it. Maybe there was a personal reason that you started the brand or started working for the brand. And a lot of it is about what you want your customers to experience. So we can’t get away from that. We can’t focus on our online reputation and only be worried about the stars we’re getting. We need to still remember, this all starts in person. This starts offline. And so the training and onboarding that you do with your people and the description of your culture and how you want your customers to be treated, still needs to be the driving force to getting those online reviews. And then the other thing we need to always pay attention to when we’re going to start engaging our reviews is trends and themes across the review.
So again, let’s acknowledge how much work you have as a multi-location business. If we’re going to spend the time to have a strategy for replying, we want to get some value out of these reviews too. And identifying trends and themes is great if there’s a problem area or something you need to fix, but it’s even more valuable to tell you what you’re doing really, really well. I work with a guy named Jeff Toister. He is written a couple of books on customer service, and he always tells me that the key to unlocking reviews is figuring out what your competitive advantage is. Okay.
If any of you live down south in some of the southern states, you probably have heard of Buc-ee’s. It’s a huge gas station. I had never heard of it until I started working with Jeff, my friend, but he told me, “Anyone who has been to a Buc-ee’s and knows the Buc-ee’s, knows it’s a massive gas station, almost like a grocery store. But the thing that really makes them wild and stand out is these huge bathrooms that are always pristine.” They’re well taken care of, well cleaned, well stocked, and this is something that they had done from the start, but they really determined people choose them on road trips for that reason.
And so they’ve doubled down on that area of their business. And when you start aggregating your review data, I want you to think of it that way too. We don’t just need to focus on when we get criticisms. We can shout out our staff for doing things really well. We can highlight all the times that a reviewer experienced what we’re trying to create for them. So think of the different themes and trends you can identify across reviews. And for many of you maybe working with one of our verified platform partners, make sense. These are examples of some of the different review aggregate sites that are verified and confirmed platform partners of Yelp.
The reason I point out our confirmed partners is because sometimes on different review aggregate sites, they’ll tell you things like, “We can get you more five-star reviews”, or “We can fix your one-star reviews. Those businesses are normally doing some shady tactics that are not with our terms of service and content guidelines. One thing in particular being the asking of reviews, and I’ll get into that in a little bit, but some of these platforms can be fabulous if you need a place where you can log in and see a dashboard of the review data. Keywords being mentioned a lot, drilling down by locations, et cetera. So keep those in mind, but also know that many businesses still run great review tracking, simply using an Excel sheet, so it can be done in other ways and we’ll include an article in the follow-up that walks through some of those examples that my colleague Jeff and I have formatted.
All right, when we’re talking about strategies for maximizing our feedback, particularly in the multi-location area, I want you to think about having this plan so that when the review comes, we’re not acting emotionally. If we have a little bit of a template formatted and a couple of different options, depending on the type of review, we can remove a lot of the friction and we can be more strategic and efficient about it. So I want you all to think about who the right person is to be replying to reviews. It might be a marketing person at the corporate level, but if that is the approach and it’s not being managed locally, there are probably times and moments, depending on the review, where a little situation of meeting needs to happen between the person managing and the operator getting that feedback or criticism. So keep that in mind.
Having little playbooks or recommendations of how your local staff can operate is also really helpful. Sometimes it’s just a document with example responses that they can templatize. They can also use this recording, which we will send out, and they have screenshots in here of the different types of responses that they might do. Now, when you’re responding, you’re responding because it has an impact. It really does. And for years I’ve been saying that by responding, you’re sending a signal to potential consumers that you care and that you want them to have a good experience. And we were saying that based on a lot of what we see and the behavior, but this new survey data really highlights the point even better for me. 56% of respondents say that when an owner replies, it makes them trust the business more. So that’s just a general behavior practice, but this next one really hits at home.
87% of review readers say they’re more likely to look past a critical review if the business has responded and addressed the concern. What this statistic says to me is consumers who are searching and seeing critical reviews, trust that criticism less when the business has replied. And the psychology behind that makes a lot of sense. If I see that a consumer had a less than great experience, but the business actually cares and reached out when they heard about it, not only am I more likely to go directly to the business if I have a concern, but I’m also more likely to share a great experience if I have one because I know the business reads it. So keep that in mind and remember, getting a critical review or even a four-star or a three-star review isn’t what the consumer focuses on, but if you have a strategy for replying to those and they can see on your page both to the great and to the critical reviews, you’re active, that is what matters to the consumer and might make them choose you over your competition.
All right, let’s break down the different types of reviews and the strategic response you’ll use for each. I’m going to start with the positive reviews because this is often overlooked. A lot of businesses have a plan for when they get a critical review, but they just let those positive ones sit there. In my opinion, if you have a bit of a template and you keep it short and sweet and direct, a public comment can be extremely effective for a positive review. And the reason is not only can it deepen that relationship with the consumer who loved their experience, but it can also highlight the keywords, phrases, or offerings that that reviewer might have mentioned in their review. So when you or the person managing the review at that listings’ location are responding, I think there’s value in using that public comment.
Thank the reviewer for what they wrote. Maybe highlight an item or two that they mentioned really being an impact on their great experience and then welcome them back or tell them you can’t wait to see them again. What you don’t want to do is send the exact same thank you message to everyone as a public response. So if you’re dealing with high volume and you’re feeling like you’re going to have to just send the same thank you to everyone, I still think the thank you is valuable. It deepens that relationship and shows the customer you’re appreciative of them sharing their experience, but using the direct message is probably easier and doesn’t make you look as canned or repetitive on the front end of your account. There also is an auto think button on Yelp. It looks like two hands shaking. So if you’re the marketing director for example, and you’re managing 40 locations and you’re the one logging in, seeing when there’s new reviews, maybe that button is the operational thing that works best.
But I think in the long term, if you can even write two or three templatized responses and let people swap between them or reply to some of the positive reviews publicly, that can have a really big impact on how people think about you and your customer service. You also want to make sure that you’re amplifying those positive reviews. This is word of mouth. This is people sharing what they think, not you telling people what to think about your business. So shout it from the rooftops, share it on your website, share reviews of the week or of the month on your social and not just Yelp reviews. Share all of your reviews and let consumers know you’re paying attention.
Let’s break down our critical reviews now, and the way I want to think about critical reviews and a reminder I want to give you is, we are never responding to a critical review to get into a back and forth dialogue or try to win the consumer over. Okay. That’s a great benefit of having a response strategy and by being quick to respond, you can also sometimes make that happen faster, but we are never responding with the intent of getting the review removed, updated, or to start arguing back and forth with our consumer, okay. We are responding to reflect our customer service practices to all future consumers. So think back to that statistic. 87% of people don’t necessarily trust a critical review if the business responds and addresses it, so you are responding to address it and you’re responding in a way that likely takes the conversation offline.
Now, this first bucket, legitimate. I want to acknowledge the fact that many of you are running businesses where hundreds of humans are what make it operate. Legitimate, less than five-star experiences are going to happen. It’s human nature. Sometimes you have an off day, your cook has an off day. I mean I have off days. We all have been there, right. Sometimes you get a legitimate critical review. The best thing you can do in that scenario is humanize the brand by thanking the reviewer for their feedback, identifying that what they experienced was not the norm for your business. Maybe pointing back to what the typical expectation is, and then take the conversation offline, whether you let them know you sent a direct message. I’ve seen businesses give a standard email address or maybe a direct phone number to a support center where they can speak to the customer directly.
But with these reviews, we’re not getting into this long detailed back and forth. We’re strategically thanking them for leaving the review, addressing the area of concern and taking it offline. Now, if we move into this next bucket here, reviews within inaccuracies in them, the only time I want you to correct an inaccuracy when you respond to a review is if it impacts future consumers. The price of something, a special, information that needs to be corrected for potential consumers, not the nitpicky details of what they said and what you think happened based on your server’s explanation, but the facts that are going to impact another consumer’s ability to do business with you. And again, in these responses, let’s say they outlined five or six things that were just horrible in their mind, we’re not really trying to address every single thing and show all the other customers what our answer is on everything.
We’re just showing responsiveness, we’re addressing the concern and we’re taking it offline. This last column, the rant or rave column, I want to first acknowledge that consumers are smart. You all are consumers. I’m a consumer. We’ve all seen reviews that feel like someone is going a little bit over the top and probably isn’t reflective of what my experience would be at that business. And so remember that sometimes those people identify themselves as outliers on their own, simply by what they write. But on Yelp, you can actually click on the user’s name, it’ll take you to their profile, and you’ll see a full breakdown of all the reviews they’ve ever written. If you’re seeing that this person is skewing negative, always giving one and two stars or something of that nature, maybe it’s one where you don’t message anything or you just send a direct message.
Now, I will say, again, to reiterate my point that we’re not necessarily responding to the reviewer or for the reviewer, that does make my opinion stand that a public comment is always the best, but I do think that there are times and certain business reasons why you would only use a direct message or you would not respond at all. I just want to highlight again that if you’re only replying via direct message, you’re not getting that added benefit of showing your customer service practices on the front end of your page. So keep that in mind, and I know we have a lot of health and medical professionals on the call today, so I needed to do a little addressing of HIPAA. Obviously, please consult your attorneys when you’re making your little toolkits for how to reply, but the basic rule of HIPAA, and we will send a link to a HIPAA article that was written by HIPAA expert on our blog on how to respond.
But the basic rule of thumb and how to abide by HIPAA while still responding is to not acknowledge, confirm or verify that the reviewer is a patient. So on the left here, we have an example of a one-star review going into a bunch, bunch of different reasons why it was not a good experience, and we see in the response here that they’re very generic and general, pointing to how they function and operate on a brand level and then giving opportunities or options to get in touch directly. Innovative Express Care is actually a good example of a lot of different reviews. You’ll be able to reference that business name when you get look at these slides post the presentation, but definitely go dig deeper there if you want to see more examples. On the right here, we do have an example that breaks HIPAA compliance, so this one verifies that it was a patient and directly invites them back.
We want to make sure that we’re avoiding that. We’re letting the consumers review speak for their own experience and we’re responding in general generic operational terms. I hope that clears it up, but the follow-up email will have that HIPAA article. It goes much more into detail about how you can use responses. At the end of the day, no matter how many locations, how many reviews you’re managing, this ends up getting emotional, and I know hats off to larger brands who have started to systemize this stuff. Many of you on the line might be the marketing managers doing this response strategy, and so I know sometimes it’s easier when you’re responding on behalf of a business you work for and not a business that’s your own baby, but even when it is you responding on behalf of a company and a brand, particularly that you’re proud of, it can get emotional when you get criticism.
So these three tips were actually given to me by a business owner that I’ve known for years. He operates tons of moving companies around the country and he always says, “You know Emily, all these years in, I still get fired up, and so I have to pause and take a moment. I step away. Sometimes I go vent to a manager or my wife or whomever, but I take a step away. Then, when I do respond, I always take the high road.” And I know many of you know this already. You’re already giving customer service strategies to all of your employees, but when we’re talking about the people managing the responses, we want to make sure we’re never breaking that business professional persona when we’re replying. You can be human, you can be empathetic, but you do not want to talk down to them or back with just as much anger and vitreal that they have.
Those are the types of things that almost validate or verify some of those criticisms. So take the high road and give a professional response, and then lastly, take comfort in knowing you cannot please 100% of your customers 100% of the time. Many of you are operating at large scale, and so getting critical reviews or critical feedback is normal, and honestly, it’s a sign of doing enough business. It makes you look trustworthy to consumers, particularly when you’re replying and simply by replying. You can put into question that criticism and highlight that you care about customer experiences. Before I open up the floor for live Q and A, I do want to go into this quick rule of thumb and very important thing for you to know. Yelp has a strict policy against asking for or soliciting reviews, and we both have our automated software that looks out for that behavior as well as our team of experts who do content moderation, and we don’t want to be asking for those reviews for a number of reasons.
The first one being it creates an innate bias, but it also creates a weird taste in the mouth of your customers. You can certainly ask for online feedback in general or tell your customers you would love to hear about their experience online, but what you don’t want to do is try to point them specifically to Yelp, for example, to try to garner a lot of extra Yelp reviews. And I think this recently found statistic really hits at home for me. Consumers turn to review sites like Yelp because they trust them and they know that we do content moderation and we have rules. For example, review has to have text with it on Yelp. It can’t just be a star rating, but reviewers and consumers do say that if they found out a business was asking or soliciting for reviews and those reviews were fake, it would really decrease their trust in the business and even make them not choose that business in the future.
So a better way is to just simply engage those customers, create memorable experiences, and let them know you’d like to hear about it online and point to all the different platforms that you have a presence, Yelp, Google, TripAdvisor, if you have different sites specific to your industry. Giving them those digital options and showing them that you care is the best way to engage that. I also wanted to point out our trust and safety site. If you go to trust.yelp.com, you can learn a lot more about all the work that we do to make our site trustworthy and reliable. It really is a conscious behavior at protecting consumers and business owners. We share a lot of data there on the type of content moderation we do. How many reviews, for example, are removed because they’re competitors trying to write fake criticisms about their competition. This is something we take immensely seriously, and we really do care about making sure that Yelp is a place that you know customers will believe what they see and be able to trust, that they can get in touch with you through the platform.
So check that out if you have questions about how we moderate the content, how the software works, or any additional things that go into the trust and safety of Yelp. As a little high level summary of some of those items we want to avoid, don’t write reviews of your own business or ask your employees to write those reviews. That goes against our terms of service, and you don’t want to be offering things in exchange for reviews either. That actually goes against FTC. You might know, for example, of someone’s doing a sponsored ad on Instagram, they have to label it as an ad. Very similar if reviews are incentivized or exchanged for things too. That needs to be disclosed in the review, and so by simply avoiding that, you’re really just making sure you’re on the right path and not accidentally breaking any of the rules.
We included this checklist for you here. You can certainly reference it back after today, but it takes you through all the areas we discussed today. First, figure out if we’re managing those pages at the free localized level or if we’re doing that paid corporate oversight strategy with bulk upload and help really managing and customizing those pages. Make a local response strategy playbook for your managers and operators. You can use this presentation. We’ll be sending some great resources as a follow-up of how to respond in blog format, and then make sure that the profiles are completed on Yelp and other online review sites. We know those consumers are turning to these platforms for yes, information and feedback from other customers, but also for your hours, what you offer and images of what they can expect when they work with you. You also want to make sure you’re responding in a timely manner.
I recommend 24 hours, and lastly, take a look at some of those paid solutions to boost your leads. Yelp has evolved so much in the past few years, and for many of you probably managing tons of different online costs per click campaigns, by simply logging into Yelp and clicking around, I’m sure you’ll easily see how you can customize and modify those packages. Our team of experts at the multi-loc level, they’re extremely smart at how they can help you customize your page and really modify the ads. If you have a new location you want to push, for example, or if there’s a certain offering seasonally that you want to get more buzz around, they can really help you customize and modify those different campaigns or paid options to get that visibility.
I’m going to open it up for Q and A here, but I do want to plug the business blog, which has evolved so much during the pandemic. The past three years we’ve really doubled down. Great info here about Yelp, but great info in general about running businesses. We actually recently launched an article about when you should systemize and when you should hire staff for different parts of your business, so that could be of interest to you. Some of our other expert authored blogs could be of interest as well. We have some franchise specific resources on there, so certainly check out the business blog and then as I mentioned before, business.yelp.com where you can log in and manage those pages, also has our on-demand events. It has our podcast and it has upcoming live events as well.
So check that out if you want to see any more digital content related to webinars or certain presentations we’ve done with industry experts. We also have that brand.yelp.com website. This is brand new and it really is user friendly. It allows you to choose multiple options of getting in touch with our team, whether that’s via email, scheduling the time for a video call, doing a live chat. It’s all possible there, and you can also actually do some good research on what the ad products and features look like before you even hop on one of those calls. So certainly check that out and keep that in mind.
My last shameless plug for Behind the Review, these business owners really do get real raw and authentic with me. We’re not only talking to five-star businesses and we’re not only talking about five-star reviews, so certainly tune into that or maybe tell your local operators to listen if they need a little more inspiration on why they should respond and how responding can relate deepen relationships with customers. I’m going to leave this slide up on the page for my first few minutes of Q and A so that you can jot down my email address again if you need it, but now is the much awaited time for live questions.
Take your cursor to the bottom of the screen. If you want to message me something, you’ll see that toolbar pop up and the button labeled Q and A with the two overlapping bubbles will come directly to me. Looks like I have one in here already, but don’t be shy. We’ve got 10 minutes left, so plenty of time. All right. This first question, “What if someone specifies they do not want to be contacted by businesses? What would be the best way to respond to a critical inaccurate review?” Really good question. So you might notice sometimes if you get a review from a reviewer, the button to send a direct message might not be there if the consumer has selected that they don’t want to be contacted by businesses.
In that case though, you still can do a public response and I think a very general public response addressing that you weren’t able to send them a direct message, you’re sorry their experience wasn’t up to par and you’d love to connect with them directly, can go a really far away. And hey, they might never respond or reach out or get in touch with you, but at least you can illustrate, “Hey, we heard this was less than five-star and we want to talk to you about it even if you’re not interested in communicating with us.” If you want to craft a response to that and you’d like me to look it over or help finesse the language of addressing that they don’t want you to reach out to them directly, I’d be happy to. You can shoot me an email. I help edit people’s responses very often, so you won’t be a stranger if you’d like me to help with that.
All right, let’s see if I have any other questions. Don’t have any rolling in right now, but I still see we have quite a few of you on the line, so don’t be shy. Feel free to drop a question in there, no question too big or small. You can ask it anonymously if you’d like, and also if you just want to talk to me one to one, or you have a question you’d rather sidebar on, shoot me a note, I’d be happy to help you out. Let’s see if any of these other questions that we answered, I think we got them all. Let me give it another minute or so and then we can wrap for the day. But I will just say thank you all so much for taking time to join us. I know three years into the pandemic, webinars sometimes feel like, huh, a webinar, but I really enjoyed chatting with you live today.
I’d love to stay in touch if you have questions, and I know that our enterprise team would be more than happy to talk to you further about how to manage your profiles, how to do bulk uploads, or how to even get some paid ads behind your brand to get more visibility. Questions rolling in. “Can we display reviews across locations?” So Crystal, I hope I’m understanding this correctly. Do you mean can you see reviews for multiple locations at once? If you are doing the bulk management and corporate logins, you can log in and manage multiple locations of reviews and listings, et cetera, but if you’re asking about using reviews as a marketing tactic, you can publish your Yelp reviews other places, so social or your website. There’s actually direct buttons through the business owner’s account to do that, to share a review directly, but you can also grab them yourself or screen grab them.
I’ve seen businesses do really cool things in their brick and mortar space. Sometimes they’ll have a wall of reviews and they have things printed. I hope that answered your question, and I’m not sure if you were talking about displaying a different way, so feel free to clarify for me if you were. All right. “If we are just starting to answer questions, should we respond to old reviews?” Really, really, really good question. When I think about responding to old reviews or starting a response strategy and how far to go back, there’s two ways I want you to think about it. The first is volume. So if you’re dealing with a hundred plus listings and they’re getting on average three to five plus reviews a month, you’re probably only going to go back like 30 or 60 days to keep it realistic and manageable.
What you want to do though is be strategic about how you’re doing those responses and simply mention something like, “Thank you for sharing your experience. We’ve just recently started managing our listings and we’re so happy to get feedback from customers like you.” Something that shows, “Hey, we’ve started now and we’re going to move forward.” If you’re not dealing with as much volume, I think there can sometimes be value in going all the way back. I’ve had home pros before who just start responding and they’ll go back and reply to all their reviews because it’s less than 20 total, for example. So depending on your industry and the volume, I think that impacts it, but at least going back a 30-day window is probably good. And if going back is the thing that’s going to hold you back from responding going forward, then don’t even worry about it. Just pick up today or next week as the new response strategy. But I think setting those expectations for yourself to do it in a timely manner and do it for both positive and negative going forward can be really, really impactful.
All right. “Which one of the online reputation partners would you recommend for an automotive business?” Really good question. I think a lot of those platform partners diversify in all types of industries. I would say that Yelp for sure trusts all of those brands and we’ve vetted them thoroughly. I personally know Soshi, I’ve done a couple of platform partnership webinars with them before, and I know that auto is an industry that they have a presence in, so I would point to them as a partner that I think is great and would trust, but any of those brands displayed on the verified partner page are definitely checked out and embedded by us, and you should trust that they’re a good option for sure.
All right. “Should customers see.” Oh, Crystal, I see. Okay. So if you want customers to see all the reviews, that would probably be done on your website, for example, or on your social where you could share from different locations in one place. But on Yelp in particular, the listing pages are going to be location specific, and the reviews should go on the correct location listing. So you don’t want reviews from other locations displayed on there. The only time that would be different is if a location closes or relocates, you would either be able to update the listing depending on the change, or have a banner on the closed page that points to the new page. So people can associate the reviews on both listings, but oftentimes you’re going to update the page, particularly if the consumer experience isn’t changing.
Got three more minutes here. Let’s see what else I can get to. “Can you flag a blatantly meritless negative review to Yelp for review or removal?” Yes, you can. All reviews on Yelp can be flagged. You can do it on the front end or through the business user account. I recommend always flagging through the business user account. When you select the flag option next to every review, it’s the little button in the upper right-hand corner, you’ll get a dropdown of reasons why you’re flagging the review. The first one is that the review has false information. You do not want to choose that option because Yelp cannot take sides on a factual dispute. The reason that a review will be removed is if it violates our terms of service or content guidelines. So for example, it’s an ex-employee. It doesn’t reflect a firsthand consumer experience. It’s a competitor.
Those are all reasons the review would be removed, but our team is going to need to be able to see some evidence of that behavior. So any information you can include in the notes section of the flag is very helpful. And if you flag a review and it does not be get removed, but you do think it goes against the terms of service, you can submit a request for a secondary flag. You’ll never have the same employee evaluate the review twice, so a second opinion will be had, and from there, you can determine what you’re going to do. I do advise businesses to reply, even if they’re going to flag the review. I still think it’s a good practice. And then the best case scenario is the review and your response comes down. The worst case scenario is the content stays on the page, but at least you’ve replied and reflected your customer service practices.
All right. “We had multiple people set up multiple individual pages, and now we want to streamline our Yelp presence. How do we go about that if we can’t track down who set them up?” So Anna, if you have the Yelp page URLs, our team can help you re-access them under that single login, if you’re doing that paid corporate partnership. They can also help you re-access them if you’re doing it at the localized level. It’ll be a reclaiming process. But this is actually a really good reason why we want to use generic email addresses when we claim localized pages, particularly if we’re going the free route. Okay. If you have a manager using their own email, they leave, you’re going to be dealing with some of this trouble. If you have an email alias for the location, much easier to transition ownership.
Looks like I have one more question, which is perfect because I have one minute. “Is there a way to remove non-relevant images added by customers?” There is. You can flag images the same way you can flag reviews, so if you’re in the back end of your account and you go to the photos tab, you’ll see not only the photos that you’ve uploaded but all of your user photos. You can click the flag button on any individual photo and it’ll give you options for why you’re flagging the review. The best thing that you can notate or indicate is why the image no longer reflects the current consumer experience. That’ll be the most likely reason to get that content removed quickly.
I really, really hope that this was helpful. I’m so glad that you can join us. Please go to brands.yelp.com to get in touch with a specialist who can talk to you specifically about your listing management and helping you streamline all that into one account. My name’s Emily Washcovick. I hope you’ll connect with me and we’ll see you next time on our upcoming webinar. Bye for now.
