Your employees do a lot for you, sometimes throwing more on their plate could get mixed reactions. However, nowadays you really need your employees actively getting your business reviews.
Reviews have become one of the most important components for businesses to focus on. They are where a majority of consumers turn to determine the quality of a business before buying from them. Most of them reading reviews on your Google My Business page.
The more people asking for reviews, the more reviews you’ll likely receive. Hence, why you need to encourage your employees to capture these reviews for you.
Why Your Employees Should Be Getting You Reviews
- Your employees are normally the people who are actually performing the service for your customers. The review request often has the best success when it comes from the person they’ve connected with.
- If you have 10 employees out in the field asking for reviews consistently, you should be getting 10 times the reviews.
- The flow of consistent reviews is huge for SEO as well as how your business will be perceived by the public.
- It might just be the most important requirement of your employee’s job (besides providing incredible service, of course).
If you can turn your team of employees into review generation machines, your business will be in incredible shape. The question is, how can you convince or encourage them to ask for reviews?
Incentivizing Employees to get Google Reviews
Giving employees a little gift for getting you a positive review is a win-win situation. Some companies will do something like $10 per review, others who see more customers per day may do a $25 gift card every 10-20 reviews.
Tracking these reviews can be a tedious task, but a solution like 2 Step Reviews makes it easy.
With 2 Step Reviews, you can track how many review requests your employees are sending, how many they receive, and their success rate. This makes it easy not only to reward employees when they reach the milestone you are incentivizing them with, but also to see who is doing what you asked and who needs an extra nudge.
You can also incentivize them based on the review invites they send instead of the reviews they receive. However, it’s probably better to reward employees after generating a certain number of reviews. If they send out 100 invites and receive zero reviews back, they’re clearly doing something wrong.
Another way you can take this data, or if you’re tracking reviews manually, is to reward the employee with the most reviews at the end of each month. Something like a $250 Amazon gift card will go a long way for a friendly competition between your team.
On a more creative side, you can set a monthly limit, say 15 reviews, and whoever gets 15 reviews in the month gets a prize or to “spin the wheel”. By spin the wheel, you can do something fun, and a team-building event.
Here are a few examples of employee review contests:
- If you get 15 reviews in the month you get to throw a dart at a gift card board. Wherever you land, you get that amount in a gift card.
- You get to play the boss in a ping pong game to 11. If you beat him you get $100.
- You have an actual wheel to spin with different prizes on each square.
- You get 3 shots from across the office to throw a paper ball into the garbage – if you get it in you get $100.
These are just a few examples of what you can do. Don’t be scared to mix it up and make it fun for the employees. The results from an activity like this usually result in an increase in reviews for you.
Increased Demand for Consumer Created Content Means You Need More Reviews.
Your customers want you to have reviews. The internet is becoming more and more consumer-friendly, meaning it’s moving toward consumer-created content over business-created content.
Not too long ago, consumers would find a business from Google’s search results and judge them based on their website’s content. In this day and age, consumers are able to read about past customer experiences and even see real before and after photos.
Consumer content is becoming more and more what people seek because they trust the opinions of previous customers over the fluff that’s on a business’s website or social media postings.
Obviously, a business won’t flaunt its flaws, which consumer reviews will. Today, your business is expected to be of the best quality and to complete the job you’ve agreed to do. If it doesn’t, why are you in business?
The bulk of this consumer-created content is in the form of reviews. That’s why generating new and fresh reviews is becoming increasingly important for your business.
Employee Generated Reviews
As a business owner, it’s not your job to go out and get reviews for your business. It is, however, your job to implement a system and train your employees to generate these reviews.
As an employee, you should understand that the business you’re working for needs to do well in order for you to keep your job (and possibly get a raise). That should be enough to encourage you to get more Google reviews, but a lot of the time it isn’t.
That’s why giving a little nudge to these employees will benefit your business as a whole. Rewarding your employees for a certain number of reviews has proven to be extremely beneficial for many different industries. Putting a simple incentive in play like a $25 Amazon gift card can go a long way, and will make employees really hustle to gather as many reviews as they can. Plus, it’s nice to reward your employees for doing a good job.
If you’re giving a $25 gift card for every 10 reviews, you only pay $2.50 per review. That’s a lot better than trying to buy reviews from somewhere sketchy that will likely penalize your listing anyways.
When your employees have a reward in place for generating reviews, there’s no doubt that they will perform better. Now you just need to train them how to ask for reviews without being too pushy or sounding desperate.
