How to Get More Five-Star Reviews for Your Business

Five-star customer reviews are critical to your business’ success. When someone is in the market for your products or services, they turn to places like Google and Yelp to find the best options—and the businesses with the most (and best) reviews are the ones they see first.

People also use social media platforms like Facebook to look for businesses—usually in order to contact them through the app. Regardless of whether or not you’re regularly sharing content on social media, you can expect some people to look at your page, which means they’ll also see the ratings and reviews people have left you there. 

A few bad reviews could be enough to stop a potential client in their tracks or make a faithful customer reconsider. 

And if you have too few reviews, your business may appear less legitimate than the competition. People don’t know if they can trust a handful of five-star reviews because it would only take a few friends, family members, or employees to manufacture those ratings. And even if they look like real reviews, consumers can’t be confident they’ll have the same experience when there aren’t very many of them.

So, how do you get more five star reviews? With Numa, it’s easy. We’ll explain how it works in a moment, but first, let’s answer a basic question you might be wondering: can you passively earn enough reviews over time?

Can’t you just earn more reviews?

It’s nice to imagine that if you simply do what you do best and run a successful business, the positive reviews will trickle in over time. On some level, that’s true. But it probably won’t be enough.

Some people leave reviews on their own without any prompting. They had a positive experience with your business and they want to tell people about it. But people are a lot more likely to share about a negative experience on social media or review sites. If you let that ratio play out naturally, your business will look a lot worse online than it actually is.

On top of that, your competitors are actively seeking out more reviews, too. The last thing you want is for a sub-par business that’s better at requesting reviews to look like the leader in your category.

Reviews do come in naturally. But most businesses that have hundreds or thousands of reviews don’t get there by accident. They get there by being amazing at what they do and having a strategy for turning excellent service into excellent reviews.

And that’s where Numa comes in. Numa is an advanced business texting solution that lets you prompt customers via text to review your business online. Here’s how to get more glowing reviews with Numa.

Decide where you want your reviews to come from

There are a lot of places someone might leave a review for your business. And unfortunately, they’re not going to rate you everywhere. If you leave it up to chance, your ratings will be randomly distributed across Yelp, Google, Facebook, and other review sites that may or may not be important to your business.

So how do you know which review sites you want to focus on? That depends on three things:

  1. Where are your customers most likely to look?
  2. Where are your competitors getting the most reviews?
  3. Where do you want to have the strongest presence?

With Numa, you can prompt your customers to leave reviews on a specific site or give them options. But wherever you send them, you want to make sure you’ve chosen that review site intentionally.

If you have reason to believe most customers find you through Google (or you want to ensure more people do), that’s probably where you want to focus.

If a competitor has a huge rating advantage on Yelp, you may want to close the gap—or climb ahead on places where they don’t have as many.

And if you’ve established a strong local following on Facebook and use this channel frequently to communicate with customers, you’ll want to have plenty of reviews on your page.

Customers will discover and evaluate your business from a variety of sites. But it’s up to you to decide which ones do the most to help you stand out from the competition.

Customize your review request

When you ask customers to leave you a review, you want it to sound like you. You don’t want some third-party service spamming your customers with generic messaging that doesn’t fit your voice, tone, or style. 

With Numa, you can completely customize what a review request looks like, so you can be confident it fits your brand. 

Want to use emojis? Have at it. Got a slogan or tagline? Put it in there. Need a signature to personalize each request? You’ve got it.

People are most receptive to messaging that sounds natural and authentic. And your messaging can only be natural and authentic if it has your personal touch.

Don’t automate review requests!

A lot of review-requesting solutions completely automate the process for you. Whenever someone has an interaction with your brand, they get a review request. These automated solutions quietly work away in the background, sending a steady stream of new reviews your way.

But there’s a problem. 

These systems have no way of knowing if someone had a good or bad interaction with your business. So they ask everyone to leave a review—even people who just had a frustrating time. It doesn’t matter if an employee made a mistake or was in a bad mood, or if your product or service simply let them down. The tech doesn’t know, so it requests a review anyway.

Automated review systems try to solve this problem with “review gates.” A review gate asks someone to share about their experience with you before requesting a review. If someone says they had a bad experience, it directs them down a different path—perhaps to an internal-facing feedback system—where they can vent their frustrations without blasting you on a public channel.

But review gates aren’t all that effective.

When someone has a bad experience with your business and you send them a review request with a review gate, they see right through it. They realize you’re trying to prevent them from leaving a review, and they go back through and say they had a positive experience—so you’ll show them where to one-star you.

After someone just had a bad experience with your business, sending them to a review gate is pretty tone-deaf. And it makes them more frustrated, which means they’ll be more motivated to put your business on blast.

Thankfully, Numa gives you a better way to request customer reviews.

Have employees act as a “review gate”

You don’t want just anyone to leave you a review. And that’s why automation isn’t a good strategy for increasing your ratings count. At Numa, we recommend that businesses use employees as a review gate. 

In person, your employees can get a pretty good idea of who would leave a positive review--and they certainly know which customers not to ask. Similarly, they can review a text exchange with a customer and infer if they are a good candidate for a review request. Either way, Numa helps you streamline the process. 

When an employee sees a good opportunity, they can simply send that customer a review request via text using your customized template. Then Numa handles the rest, directing customers to the review sites that matter most to your business, and letting you know when a customer clicks through the link.

It’s easy to train employees to see these opportunities, and it only takes them seconds to send a request. It’s like a human review-gate. And unlike simply asking someone to leave a review in person, Numa lets you send them a convenient link that takes them straight from a text message to your preferred review site.

So, want to increase your reviews?

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