Reviews are becoming a dominant strategy for evaluating purchases in general, and software is no exception. MINDBODY has been slammed pretty hard on Capterra, which is one of the top ranked review websites when one Googles “MINDBODY reviews”. Review gaming ranges from actions that feel pretty innocent and innocuous—such as mentioning to a very satisfied client that they’re welcome to post a positive review, to actions that feel pretty sleazy—such as providing free services or products in exchange for positive reviews. It might be worth our time to try something quite innocent for a few months, perhaps via onboarding or account development inviting super-satisfied clients who are expressing their thanks to the front-line team member to post a review.
In order to facilitate having onboarding or account development invite very satisfied clients to post reviews, we would want to:
Capture a baseline “snapshot” of our reviews on key sites at present.
Plan what we want to change.
Come up with a basic plan of who would do it and how. I suspect that subscribers with whom we’ve had 1-on-1 conversations and who express their satisfaction would be the best candidates.
Ensure the plan is legal and fits with our Core Values.
Listen to any concerns or insights the front-line employees have about how this might go. Adjust course as needed.
If those concerns still encourage the project, communicate clearly to the front-line employees what kind of subscriber is the ideal person to invite to post a review and how and when we would encourage them to do this.
Track the changes from the baseline “snapshot”.
Track how the subscribers react to the invitation to post a review.
Re-evaluate regularly.
Better reviews could lead to more subscribers. In particular, I’d expect thorough and discerning potential subscribers who have the potential to become HQSs to read reviews. While the idea of gaming reviews heavily leaves a bad taste in my mouth, the idea of an onboarding agent saying “…oh, well, you’re welcome—well, I appreciate that—well, feel free to leave a review on Capterra…” seems more palatable.
These added reviews, and the chance we get to see which reviews get up-voted, might even lead to some helpful tips that we haven’t considered. For instance, maybe users will tell each other how best to prepare for their onboarding call to make it go as smoothly as possible. Maybe an answer to a common tech support question will get answered so well that it will get up-voted and it will show up on Google anytime someone has that question, lessening our tech support calls.
Reviews put us at the mercy of our subscribers, but it would be nice if there were a few more from our very satisfied clients, as otherwise the only people who take the initiative to go find a place to write a review about us seem to only be people who are pretty gosh darn angry with MINDBODY.