How to Manage Online Reviews

If you’re like most independent agents, your website has only two reviews of your agency—and they’re probably at least a year old.

Online reviews are key to shoppers as they research products and services, and that reveals a huge area of opportunity, says Paul Kerrigan, who leads a team that provides marketing tools for Progressive’s network of more than 35,000 independent agents.

Online reviews are the comments customers post to sites like Facebook, Google+ and Yelp about their experience with your agency—similar to Amazon product reviews. And according to Kerrigan, many people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Search engines consider online reviews as relevant content when presenting and ranking websites. In order for a business to show up in a Google+ search result, it must have at least five reviews.

How can you up your review presence? Vendors can help automate the review-gathering process. These single platforms help you follow up with your customers after an interaction. Here’s how a review-gathering technology platform might work:

After an interaction with your agency, a customer receives an email to rate his or her experience. Because communication is by email, it’s important to make sure you’re obtaining a current, valid email address from your customers. If the customer gives you a bad rating (1 out of 5, for example), you can follow up with the customer to remedy the issue before the customer posts a bad review of your agency online.

If the customer gives you a positive rating (4 or 5 stars), the system will follow up and ask them to write a review for you on the platform of their choice. You can program in a number of review options including Facebook, Google+ and Yelp.

“We typically see an 8–10% open rate for our emails and of those who open them, about 1% will write a review,” Kerrigan says.

Implementation Tips

• Build reviews slowly and naturally; don’t go from zero to 30 in a day. Search engines could penalize your search results if it seems you’re gaming the system or posting fake reviews.
• Find a process for obtaining updated and relevant email addresses from your customers. Try to get both business and personal emails. Remember that customers likely spend more time in their work email during the day than in their personal accounts.
• Follow up with customers more than once. Set up your systems to email customers right after an interaction and then again in 30 days if they don’t respond.
• Check the competition—where are they getting reviews?
• Use a variety of platforms. Don’t put all your review eggs in one basket (e.g. only Yelp). If they’re taken down, you’ll lose the content.
• Advocate for Google+. Most people will post to Facebook, since it’s such a widely used platform. But given the search engine implications, Google+ is valuable.
• Check with your carriers to see if they offer programs that can assist with online reviews.

Reviews can provide fresh content for your website and you can repurpose customer feedback on your social platforms. Plus, you’ll gain business intelligence from better understanding your customers’ experience.

Peter van Aartrijk is an IA contributor.