Agents being damaged by review sites, claim

Estate and letting agents are among businesses losing out because of activity on review sites – with an estimated one in ten reviews being fakes and others being malicious.

The claim comes from Mark Hall, managing director of reputation management company Got Juice.

He said that 85% of consumers search for reviews and recommendations online before committing to a purchase or supplier, and that 95% of these consumers will decide against a firm if they read a negative review.

But he claimed that while review sites encourage consumers to write reviews, they do not authenticate them or attempt to prove that the reviewer is genuine.

Hall said: “A single bad review can ruin the chances of gaining new customers and create a long-standing and horrible word-of-mouth campaign offline.  

“Although the UK defamation law is in place to protect businesses and individuals from unjust mentions online, this law is difficult to enforce.”

Hall said that on the plus side, companies with positive reviews convert 183% more new business than those with no reviews or negative reviews.

He said it is vital that agents monitor reviews on sites such as allagents.

He said: “If your business receives a negative review or mention, it is very important to respond to the customer online, always remain calm and do not take it personally. A good response would be to offer an apology and a invitation to discuss things in more detail.

“For example: ‘Thanks for alerting us to this. We work very hard to offer a good and  friendly service, and I was sorry to hear on this occasion we didn’t meet your expectations. If you would like to contact me directly, then please call xxxxxxx and ask for xxxxxx or email xxxxx@XYZbusinessname’

“It may be possible to have the negative review removed, but whatever you do, do not argue or defend your business, as this will only lead to more negative comments and an increased chance of the content appearing on the first page of the search engine results pages.”

Hall went on: “Even if a business has no reviews, that can be equally as harmful as a negative one. With over 70% of new business inquiries coming from reviews, referrals and word of mouth, it has never been as important to have a good online reputation."

Got Juice, which focuses on helping businesses gain positive reviews and to fight back and remove unwanted negative press from review sites and from the first page of Google, has worked with a number of agents.

Hall said: “I can confirm that agents themselves write fake reviews. This practice is illegal.

“Letting agents also get bad press for things that are out of their control, such as high electricity bills, which can form the basis of a review.”

He criticised allagents for its default setting of ‘terrible’ when people leave a review, meaning that the setting has to be changed. He also said it was concerning that the site allows users to promote up to five reviews for a fee – currently £50 for three months.

He said this facility could be misused: “It wouldn’t take much to harm the competition, would it?”

But Martin (he does not give his surname) of allagents defended the default setting of ‘terrible’ and denied the criticisms.

He said: “The star rating selection has always had cross browser compatibility issues for us, so we decided to remove the star selector once and for all and opt for a drop down box. This has dramatically cut down the amount of time and resources we have spent trying to fix it.

“The defaulted selection is to 'terrible', the one(1) star setting and the equivalent of the minimum star rating that can be selected to post a review. Since we have changed the system to this setting, the only minor issues that we have to deal with is through human error, where a reviewer has missed changing the star rating to a higher level.”

He said of the site’s moderation: “The core services of our website are free, therefore our level 1 moderators simply do not have the time or resources to deal with minor, labour intensive issues. However if it does cause concern the great news is that agents can now opt to upgrade to a higher level of service through our popular premium support service. This provides agents access to our customer service team and also our level 2 administrators, who can attend to minor errors  as part of a comprehensive support package.”

Martin also said the featured review facility is popular, but denied it would be used by agents or individual disaffected customers to damage firms.

He said: “Our featured reviews is not a new  feature. its been available for some time but is only now starting to gain recognition from agents. In a way it is similar to the featured properties you see on property portals. We have two options.

“The first is self service, where anyone with a credit card or paypal account can feature a review online. These specific reviews are featured at the top of the profile page for a set period of time and the expiry time is stated on the review for ease.  The second is our featured control panel. This is where agents can take full control of what reviews are featured and they can change them at any time. This is a great opportunity for agents that want to make a first impression to specific types of customers, e.g. landlords or vendors.

“allagents take seriously any agent that is deliberately trying to harm or influence another agent's rating or reputation by writing false reviews about them. We clearly state on our site that this is not acceptable and if we find any agent trying to do so, then we will publish this fact on their profile page and by doing so, make it open to public view. The same fate awaits any agent that is found writing their own reviews.

“We take the credibility of our review website very seriously and need to ensure that when the public read reviews, ratings and rankings, then they do so knowing that they come from genuine customers. Every reviewer must tick a box to state that they have read our terms and conditions, so they accepting that they understand the consequences if they are caught trying to bring about unfair advantage to themselves or disadvantage to others.

“With regards to featured reviews harming competitors, whilst in theory this could happen, as long as they haven't written the review themselves then they are perfectly capable of doing so via the self service section. What we should point out that is that as a review website we don't discriminate between good or bad reviews being featured.

“We are aware of agents referring prospective clients on a regular basis to read reviews of competitors, knowing that they may not be favourable. Both achieve the same end. We don't  believe there are many agents out there that will be concerned that this could happen to them. However if there are, then perhaps this may be another reason for them taking control of the choice of their reviews that get featured.”


www.gotjuice.co.uk/blog