Reviews are great but how do we know which review service to use? Just for our business there are reviews scattered everywhere; places like Google, Yelp, The BBB, Alignable, Facebook, Angies List, Thumbtack, Houzz, Home Advisor and more.
Wouldn’t it be great if everytime a person left a review for
any company it went into a pool and got posted to ALL the review sites? We
would love that, but that’s not how it works.
We recently had dealings with a vendor for our home who recommended we check
his reviews at HomeAdvisor and they were all great so we hired him. He did a
terrible job then disappeared before the job was complete. We decided to dig a
little deeper only to discover that he had terrible reviews on Google and the
BBB.
How is it helpful if a company can just direct you to their one place where bad reviews haven’t been left yet?
Angies List used to advertise that there was no fee to the vendor to become part of their network. They made it sound so unbiased; but when the marketing team at Slip Free looked into being part of the Angies List network we learned there is actually a huge fee. Vendors pay a minimum of $300 to be part of their referral network. You don’t pay, you don’t get leads.
What does this tell us? You go to Angies List thinking you’ll get referrals from highly acclaimed businesses with reviews from past customers but you are actually getting referrals from the companies who paid the most to connect with you.
The same goes for Thumbtack and Homeadvisor and Alignable…and in a roundabout very subtle way even google ranks their search engine in part based on an algorithm that includes factors such as the number of reviews. The Better Business Bureau charges an average of $700-$1000 in annual member fees and if you choose not to be a member anymore they delete your reviews and remove your ranking.
There’s no such thing as something for nothing. While reviews are a great way to sort the diamonds from the rubble you need to know that every one of those sites are using their sales tactics to gain memberships or advertising in order to pay their bills.
Go to google, type in “Can I Buy Reviews” and you’ll see unlimited marketing sites that will allow you to BUY reviews. How can we trust online reviews ever again?
One other important note is that all of the sites with reviews have those reviews because someone on their sales force is telling the subscriber that if they get more reviews that will get ranked higher. Ask yourself. If you were a business owner and you were told you needed a minimum of 14 reviews; what would you do?
Many of us would just be diligent to ask our customers to leave a review but some companies will take the low road and use a paid service to bulk up their reviews. Beware that a company with an abnormally high volume of reviews as compared to other vendors is either a national company with super high volume or they are super diligent to wrangle reviews from every customer (which is somewhat unlikely) or they are paying for reviews.
For the record, at Slip Free Systems, all of our reviews are genuine accounts of our services and character by real people who have hired us or work for someone who has hired us.
How do we wade through all the hype as customers?
Until someone finds a way to compile the reviews into one list we do our due diligence and we check multiple sources. We ask how long they have been in business and we read the contract and we trust in God to guide us and protect us.
