Why Yelp should Seriously Eat S*^&% and Die

[ErikJonker]

Dude clearly you haven't read the post!
This has nothing to do with negative reviews I was trying to get Yelp to allow my company to update our listing phone numbers for each store because the numbers they were showing were not ringing to the proper places.

Already built our own elicitation tool Quirk Auto Dealers Reviews and we have a dedicated page for every store (optimized for search) that shows only our best reviews.

Please read the thread before commenting

Hi Daniel, I have a couple questions about the elicitation tool you built... Which looks great by the way...What did you build it on and is a link to this site sent to all sales and service customers automatically after 1 day by your CRM? I want to get an elicitation tool built for my stores ASAP.. Thanks!!!

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Hi Daniel, I have a couple questions about the elicitation tool you built... Which looks great by the way...What did you build it on and is a link to this site sent to all sales and service customers automatically after 1 day by your CRM? I want to get an elicitation tool built for my stores ASAP.. Thanks!!!

So what your saying is, you want to cherrypick through the reviews and display only the good one?

 

[DrewAment]

Hi Daniel, I have a couple questions about the elicitation tool you built... Which looks great by the way...What did you build it on and is a link to this site sent to all sales and service customers automatically after 1 day by your CRM? I want to get an elicitation tool built for my stores ASAP.. Thanks!!!

I don't think you need a "tool". We tried the rate before you rate, where you ask the customer to star or write a review before hand and try to intercept the negative reviews. We tracked it, and found we were getting LESS reviews written. IMO a better basic process is something like this:

Send out an email in the CRM from the GM/Owner like this after purchase:




As you can see we just ask them to visit the rating site Phoenix Chevrolet Reviews - which is just an embedded page in our website. I think part of the key is to also mention that they are reviewing the SALESPERSON.... Also - don't forget to send something similar to service customers, asking them to rate their service person.

Side note - as you can see I use UTM codes to track the site visits from the http://rate.sandsglendale.com domain, you would be amazed at the site engagement for people that visit from that link. You would think people would just visit, click rating link, and leave... but they don't. About 10% of them go on to look at vehicles (VDP's) - service customers looking for a vehicle?? Ya, I will take that!

 

[ErikJonker]

So what your saying is, you want to cherrypick through the reviews and display only the good one?

Up to this point, We have been handing out Post Cards asking to be reviewed on either Yelp or Google and Yelp has Flagged Every Legit Review and posted all Negative Comments...Even if Yelp Poster has only posted one review same as the positive ones......So yes, I say Cherry Pick when the Review Site Cherry Picks you Must also Cherry Pick.................what's the saying...........Fight Fire with ________? ps. the blank isn't the high road not trying to be rude just frustrated with YELP...

 

[Daniel J. Mondello]

The real point of our tool wasn't to prevent customers from posting negative or even positive reviews but more to give the customers a private channel of communication. The way it works is that if they are totally satisfied (4-5 star rating) we thank them for their feedback and send them an email asking if they would mind posting the review to a public channel.

If the review or feedback is negative we forward the reviewers contact info and comments to the general manager and advise on a way to reach out to the customer and fix the situation (where and when possible). It has helped us better handle our collection of reviews, our response to unhappy customers and also better assess who we want to elicit reviews from...

The tool works nicely for our purposes! Feel free to private message me ErikJonker if you want to work on something together. We'd be happy to help.

 

[Daniel J. Mondello]

I don't think you need a "tool". We tried the rate before you rate, where you ask the customer to star or write a review before hand and try to intercept the negative reviews. We tracked it, and found we were getting LESS reviews written. IMO a better basic process is something like this:

Send out an email in the CRM from the GM/Owner like this after purchase:

View attachment 1937


As you can see we just ask them to visit the rating site Phoenix Chevrolet Reviews - which is just an embedded page in our website. I think part of the key is to also mention that they are reviewing the SALESPERSON.... Also - don't forget to send something similar to service customers, asking them to rate their service person.

Side note - as you can see I use UTM codes to track the site visits from the Phoenix Chevrolet Reviews domain, you would be amazed at the site engagement for people that visit from that link. You would think people would just visit, click rating link, and leave... but they don't. About 10% of them go on to look at vehicles (VDP's) - service customers looking for a vehicle?? Ya, I will take that!

We use a similar template to push reviewers to our channel. I like the concept but not having a buffer or in our case a tool i think is an oversight and could lead to more would-be-not negative reviewers writing message they might otherwise have kept to themselves. I recognize that even this mentality has no shortage of pitfalls. But again, it has and is working nicely for us.

 

[JessicaRuth]

Saw this one today....

Yahoo's Yelp Partnership Whips Out Old Local Business Reviews.

 

[ErikJonker]

After being contacted via Phone VoiceMail by Yelp in December to sign-up and do ads with them and realizing that coincidentally all my positive reviews that were live for months and months had mysteriously all been blacklisted all of a sudden I decided I would do a little Yelp Experiment.

I created a yelp account with brand new email address that isn't tied to me in any way. Using a fake name and began to use that account to do "real" reviews of business's that I go to.

I reviewed:

4 restaurants (4stars) - review shows

subway restaurant that gave me food poisoning (1star) - review shows


a grocery store (4stars) - review flagged in Blacklist (not sure why this was the only review that was flagged so far)

a local magazine (1star) - review shows

By this point I have 7 reviews and 2 friends and I have also been doing all the extra stuff Yelp wants like surveys and approving images and uploading new images for its library on the places that I am reviewing....All my reviews are fairly long and detailed.


and the last review was 4 stars for my
own Honda Store - review flagged


There really seems to be no Rhyme or Reason why somethings are flagged and some aren't. Though All my bad reviews stick and only my reasonably good 4 star reviews get flagged.



**signed up with dealerrater last week to take an active stand in Reputation MGMT**

 

[Jewanski]

I'm thinking about attempting a similar experiment. Did you post the reviews from your home, or from work? I'm just thinking about IP addresses.

 

[ErikJonker]

only from the phone app at the place of business or home.... never from work.