B - Introduction

If you want to learn how to attract new customers and enhance the quality of the service provided by all of your employees through customer reviews, you've come to the right place. In this book, I'm going to show you how to create an environment where your happy customers look forward to writing 5-star reviews for your business, and your employees look forward to asking for them. The best part is that the reviews they write will not be the typical run-of-the-mill 5-star reviews, but reviews that you and your team are proud to read and share with each other. The kind of reviews that inspire your staff to provide better and better service with each new customer encounter while attracting new customers who want to work with you. The kind of reviews that Google and other review sites want to promote to a larger and larger audience by moving your listing up in the search results and showing your listing to a broader and broader audience with every passing day.

Hi, I'm Bob Sommers, the creator of the Review Integrity Method: Getting Reviews The Right Way. Over the last 12 years, I've worked with thousands of local business owners and their staff helping them learn how to get the highest percentage of their happy customers writing keyword-rich, 5-star reviews primarily on Google, without coming across as pushy, needy, or indifferent. And that's what I'm going to show you how to do in this book.

Before I taught local owners and their staff how to build their businesses by creating a stellar online reputation through customer reviews, I owned the largest customer service training company in the United States, Sommers Communication, Inc. Our team of 36 professional speakers presented over 3,000 live customer service and customer service management workshops every year in virtually every medium and large community in America. We did not become the largest customer service training company because we taught customer service skills like everyone else. We became the most sought-after customer service training company because we taught empathy, clarity, and likability in a very fun and interactive environment and watched our students apply those skills to every customer service encounter in their own unique way. As it turns out, these are the same three skills you and your team need if you want to become the highest-rated, most reviewed, and most trusted business on the Internet.

I'm going to take you on a journey of discovery. I'm going to challenge you to take a good hard look at what you're doing (or considering doing) to get customer reviews and have you consider how that strategy is affecting your customers, your employees, and your business. You will be surprised at what you learn. You may have an inkling that what you're doing (or considering doing) isn't quite right, but you've not taken a step back and looked at the process through the eyes of the people who matter most. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said: "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." I believe the same will happen to you. Once you "feel" what your employees feel when they ask for a review,  and what your customers feel when they are asked to write a review, knowing what to do will be easy. You will discover that there is one best way to get reviews where everyone wins every single time, including your customers, your employees, Google an you!

The fact that you picked up this book on Review Integrity Method: How To Get Reviews The Right Way, tells me something about you.

1) You already know the value of customer reviews and the effect they can have on your business, both positive and negative.

2) You want to get more and better reviews from your happy customers but you don't want to take advantage of your customers or come across as pushy, needy, or indifferent. 

• You don't want to SPAM your customers by sending unsolicited review requests, the same texts, and emails you ignore when you get them.
• You don't want to ask your customers to write a review while they're in your office using a QR code or any other method because you know it can be seen as intimidating and pushy.
• You don't want to offer a reward for writing a review because you know that it's illegal and against Google's TOS (or maybe you did not know that) and you don't want to lose all of your reviews when you get caught.
• In the end, you don't want to do anything that makes your customers or employees feel uncomfortable when asking for a review.

3) You're currently at one of three stages in the review request process.

• Stage 1: You've not started asking for reviews yet and you want to learn from other people's experiences. You don't want to waste your time and energy on things that don't work or worse, cause you to lose customers or fall from grace with Google. You want to learn how the most trusted companies in your industry are attracting new customers from their reviews and you want to shortcut your learning and do it correctly right out of the gate. If this describes you, then you're in the right place.
  
  
• Stage 2: You know that verbally asking a happy customer if they will write a reviews shows the highest level of respect, and you and your team have started asking for them, but things aren't going as planned. Your staff is not asking consistently, and when they do ask they're not asking with clarity or confidence. Some of your people have stopped asking altogether and when you ask why they stopped asking for reviews they give you the same three excuses: "I forgot to ask, they didn't want to write a review, I'm too busy to ask." And on the rare occasion when a customer does go to your review page, they either leave a star rating only or a very short comment that's neither helpful nor trustworthy. You're starting to think that verbally asking for a review is not worth the effort and you're ready to give up. You could not be further from the truth. You are on the right track and if you stay with me I'll show you how to get amazing results with no additinal effort, but an adaptation to what you're doing now.
  
  
• Stage 3: You've given up verbally asking for reviews. Your people have been unsuccessful and they have persuaded you that they're not going to ask for reviews any longer and there's nothing you can do to change their mind. You have a decision to make. Do you stop asking and give up on your dream of becoming the most reviewed, highest rated, and most trusted business in your community, or do you try another avenue where you can get reviews without your staff verbally asking for them? You're doing this because you're people won't ask and you can not think of any way to turn things around. On what you think is the upside, you're getting more reviews than before and you want to believe that something is better than nothing even though you know better.  A very small fraction of your customers are responding to your review request and when they do most of those reviews are not up to Google's standards and many of them are getting filtered, but you don't understand why. You know something is not right but you don't know what else you can do. Say with me.

Why Did I Write This Book?

The first reason I wrote this book is because I'm disillusioned with how otherwise smart business people are making poor decisions when it relates to getting customer reviews. They're treating their customers like a marketing tool rather than human beings. They're doing things to get reviews that they find offensive when another business does it to them. I wrote this book for you, the business owner who refuses to take the low road when it comes to gathering customer reviews.

The second reason I wrote this book is because I have never seen another book that addresses how to get customer reviews ... the right way. Every book, training program, and article about gathering customer reviews talks about all the different ways you can get reviews without taking into account the most important factor of all which is how your review-gathering technique makes your customer feel. In Chapter Two, I'm going to list the most common ways local companies go about getting Google reviews (and reviews on other sites) and I'll show you how successful each technique is and how it impracts your relationship with your customers. 

There is an old saying that goes something like this. "It's not what you say or do, but how you make people feel." In the end, it's not the review that matters, it's how your customer feels about you and your business. I want you, my reader, to take a step back and consider how you make your customers feel when you ask them to write a review and how that feeling impacts whether they will write a review or not, the quality of their review if they write one, the likelihood of them telling their friends about your business and whether they will buy from you again in the future.

And finally, if the Review Integrity Method of getting reviews the right way rings true to you, and this is how you want to build your reputation but feel like you need help doing it, we're here for you. There's no better way to show someone that you're capable of helping them than actually helping them, and that's what I'm going to demonstrate to you throughout the book.

Everything you need to succeed is here. I held nothing back. The concepts you will learn are evergreen meaning that it makes no difference what Google or any of the other review sites decide to do in the future, the principles of gathering customer feedback in every form will not change. If you need more help than you can derive from the book, we're here. You have a trusted partner you can call on to help you achieve your customer service and review goals with the highest level of integrity and do it quickly. If this is something you want to learn more about after reading The Review Integrity Method, please contact us for more information. You can find our website, email, and telephone number at the back of the book.

What is the Review Integrity Method?

The Review Integrity Method of getting reviews the right way was created for business owners and managers just like you who already know the value of customer reviews but refuse to compromise on how they go about gathering them. I'm going to show you a framework we developed with with the help of over a thousand local business owners and medical practitioners on the most effective way to get the highest percentage of your happy customers to write well-written, 5-star Google reviews because they want to, without you or your staff coming across as pushy, needy or irritating. 

1) You know the value of customer reviews, especially on Google, but you've not done anything yet to get them. You see that your competitors have lots of reviews and you're wondering how you will ever catch up, but you don't want to abuse your customers in the process.

 Why would you want to get reviews the right way?

You've been getting reviews from your customers and it does not feel right.

You would not want another company to ask you for a review in the way you're asking your customers to write a review.

It just does not FEEL right.You have more respect for your customers than that

This book was written for people just like you.

This is a journey. A journey of lessons, trials and errors, and emotional roller coaster rides.

If you follow the steps, it will get you there. If this doesn’t describe you, then like I said, this book probably isn’t right for you, and you can put it down and move on to another 12 · THE SCRIBE METHOD book that is better suited for you (if this story has nothing to do with you, yet you’ve already paid for it, then email me directly and I will give you your money back: tucker@scribemethod.com. I’m totally serious).

What will happen once you and your team are skilled in the Review Integrity Method. List benefits

A mind once expanded ...

This is a how-to book for business owners and managers. It's presented as a train-the-trainer format. I'm going to show you the step-by-step process I use when I coach business on how to get reviews properly so that you can follow my steps.