Review Generation Platforms: Which One Is Best for My Business?
By now, it shouldn’t be a secret that reviews matter to your bottom line:
- 97% of consumers read online reviews before making a buying decision in 2017.
- 94% of consumers say an online review has convinced them to avoid a business.
- Online reviews have been shown to impact 67.7% of purchasing decisions.
- 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
- 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more
But, if you haven’t already started generating reviews, you know that it can be incredibly time-consuming.
Why Use Review Generation Platforms?
Here’s the thing—according to a 2017 report by BrightLocal, 68% of consumers left a local business review when asked, with 74% having been asked for their feedback. The trouble comes with establishing a reliable way to continually ask for reviews without having to email customers manually, one-by-one. That’s where review generation platforms come in.
Online review generation platforms automate the process of asking for and posting reviews. Most of them can auto-post good reviews to your website and social media channels, but they’re not all created equal.
The Best Reputation Management and Review Generation Software
To take out the stress of combing through each review generation platform and figuring out which one is best for your business, we’ve compiled a list of the top review generation platforms and reputation management software along with the basics you should know about each one. Each one of these review platforms has a customer review average of 4.5 stars (out of five) or greater, since, you know—reviews matter:
- Nearby Now: Average of 5 Stars
- Broadly: Average of 4.9 Stars
- Grade.us: Average of 4.9 Stars
- NiceJob: Average of 4.9 Stars
- PulseM: Average of 4.9 Stars
- BirdEye: Average of 4.8 Stars
- Podium: Average of 4.8 Stars
- ReviewBuzz: Average of 4.8 Stars
- ReviewTrackers: Average of 4.8 Stars
- Customer Lobby: Average of 4.7 Stars
- TrustPilot: Average of 4.6 Stars
Nearby Now: Average of 5 Stars
How It Works: Your team checks in every time they serve a customer. Checkins describe what they did and can include a photo or a video. Checkins get dropped at the location where the customer came from, which can improve website rankings at the local level in the cities and neighborhoods that matter to you most. When your team checks in, they request a review from the customer by email or by SMS, or even by asking the customer to call your dedicated audio testimonial telephone number. Customers provide their review at their convenience, and you can steer them toward a specific platform, including Nearby Now, Google My Business, Facebook, or more than 20 other sites.
Who It’s For: Local businesses and service professionals
Major Benefits:
- It’s a local review software targeted to local service businesses
- It allows you to steer customers toward a specific review platform, like Google My Business or Facebook
- It gives you the option to share the reviews and photos to a wide range of social media platforms and websites
- It has a 40% average review response rate
- Each of its checkins gets dropped at the place where it happened and can be found by Google
- It has a wide range of integrations specific to service professionals, from your website and CRM platform to platforms like Houzz, Thumbtack, Nextdoor, and Angie’s List
- It can prompt a review with SMS messages and email
How Much it Costs: Packages from $129 per month to $499 per month
Free Trial? Yes
Broadly: Average of 4.9 Stars
How It Works: Broadly is an online review and reputation management platform that strives to help small service-based businesses increase online reviews, manage existing reviews, and monitor incoming reviews. It helps automate customer feedback with a one-click process that’s triggered by either an email or SMS text nudging the customer to give feedback. It offers a patent-pending search engine optimized review feed that allows customers to leave reviews directly on your company’s website. Every 4 and 5-star review your business gets from Google and Facebook is automatically published on your website, making sure you always have a steady stream of confident voices that back up your services.
Who It’s For: Small, service-based businesses
Major Benefits:
- It features a patent-pending code that adds search engine optimized review feeds directly to your website
- It only automatically publishes 4 and 5-star reviews on your website
- It offers feedback at the employee level using team scorecards to allow you to track customer interactions by team member
- It features a multi-location dashboard that allows franchises and local businesses with multiple locations to monitor and respond to reviews in one place
- It allows you to identify and respond to negative reviews immediately
- It offers 24-hour customer support
How Much It Costs: Contact them for pricing
Do You Get a Free Trial? Yes
Grade.us: Average of 4.9 Stars
How It Works: Grade.us is a well-known and trusted white-label review management tool with 10,000+ users generating reviews on sites like Google, Facebook, and 100+ industry-specific review sites. There are two unique features of Grade.us—their “review funnel,” which automates the process of asking, reminding, and guiding customers through the review process, and their customizable review prompt options. You can choose thumbs, stars, smiley faces, large buttons, or a written survey option. What makes this an attractive option is an ability to white label the product, which can keep your customers within your marketing ecosystem instead of branching out to other platforms and companies.
Who It’s For: All businesses
Major Benefits:
- It offers the ability to white label the product
- It guides customers to leave reviews with conversion triggers
- It allows you to embed review collection widgets to websites and social media profiles
- It has customizable email and text message capabilities
- It gives you the ability to respond directly to Facebook and Google reviews
- It has an auto-share ability to post good reviews to social media
- It features automated reports and analytics
- It can help stop negative reviews if used preemptively
- It has an easy-to-use admin dashboard
- It lets you customize your profiles with a logo, CSS, and personalized text
- It lets you embed reviews from multiple platforms into your website
How Much It Costs: Packages start at $90 per month for professionals and $200 a month for agencies
Do You Get a Free Trial? Yes
NiceJob: Average of 4.9 Stars
How It Works: Built for service businesses (B2C), SaaS, and agencies, NiceJob can connect to a number of service-specific apps and is relatively easy to use. One benefit is that NiceJob automates your social media marketing by automatically posting your local customer reviews and photos to your Facebook page. How it works is the same as most review generation sites—it prompts customers to leave a review via email or text. One feature that makes it unique is the ability to enhance reviews with photos, comments, and tags.
Who It’s For: Service businesses (B2C), SaaS, and agencies
Major Benefits:
- It was created specifically for service professionals and connects to more service-based apps like FieldPulse, Jobber, and others
- It features the ability to add photos, comments, and tags to reviews
- It features automatic social postings
- It offers measurement from automatic social postings
- It offers a stories widget, to which you can add a portfolio page, review feed, or case study page
- It gives you a microsite for your company
How Much It Costs: either $45 or $75 per month
Do You Get a Free Trial? Yes
PulseM: Average of 4.9 Stars
How It Works: Before the appointment, the app will automatically send the customer a bio, photo, and average review rating of the technician or service provider. After the appointment, the customer automatically receives a PulseCheck review request by text and email. If you receive a poor review, you are immediately notified, and the review stays internal. New, positive reviews are pushed out on Google, social media, and your website through pulseM’s web widgets. All reviews are indexed through Google structured data, which can boost your SEO and organic rankings.
Who It’s For: Home services professionals and medical industry businesses
Major Benefits:
- It offers the pulseM index, a scale from 1-10 for customers to review technicians, with different actions contributing a different number of points:
- It sends you real-time notifications that a customer is unhappy
- It helps customers feel secure by texting a picture, bio, and average review rating of their technician
- It allows you to track which of customer satisfaction per employee and establish a leaderboard
- It allows you to engage with customers via a chat widget on your website and then take the conversation directly to text message
- It’s integrated with most home services apps contractors use the most
How Much It Costs: Contact to request demo
Do You Get a Free Trial? No
BirdEye: Average of 4.8 Stars
How It Works: BirdEye brands itself as an all-in-one reputation management solution that pulls feedback from 250 online sources. It not only helps companies monitor, organize, respond to, and track reviews, but it also offers platform listening and analyzes negative reviews to find root causes of customer unhappiness. It’s easy to integrate into major CMS, CRM, and accounting platforms, making it easier to automate and respond to reviews in real-time.
Who It’s For: All businesses
Major Benefits:
- It allows you to manage reviews for multiple locations
- It lets you monitor reviews from all social platforms in one dashboard
- It has a feature to monitor your competitors’ reviews
- It features custom alert settings so specific team members can efficiently respond and monitor
- It analyzes negative reviews with Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help isolate the causes of negative reviews
- It tracks and monitors interactions and reviews on social media
- It can prompt reviews with an email
- It can automatically post reviews to your website and social media accounts
- It tracks and generates ROI reports
How Much It Costs: Quotes only available on request
Do You Get a Free Trial?: Yes
Podium: Average of 4.8 Stars
How It Works: Podium is a reputation management software that over 130,000 customers use to generate, manage, and improve their review rating and reputation on sites like Google, Facebook, HealthGrades, Edmunds, and more. The platform features a single dashboard to manage all your customer interactions including Facebook messages, Google’s click-to-message, and inbound texts. You can also manage all of your reviews from over 40 different review sites to quickly reply to reviews, report on location analytics, and understand customer sentiment. It features webinars, documentation, and both live online and in-person customer support.
Who It’s For: Any business, but it’s especially useful to locally focused companies with one or more locations
Major Benefits:
- It lets you add multiple representatives to send links to their clients
- It features a Leader Board to record the reviews (and average review rating) of each representative on your team
- It allows you to monitor and respond to reviews in real time
- It lets you test operational changes
- It enables you to manage all Google My Business and Facebook messages
- It features custom SmartSelect technology that allows you to target specific review sites most important to your business
- It doesn’t require customers to sign in to go the review site of choice and leave their feedback
- It features sentiment and text analysis
- It features survey management
- It features the ability to let each employee send out review invitations to customers that they speak to
How Much It Costs: Quotes available on request
Do You Get a Free Trial? Yes
ReviewBuzz: Average of 4.8 Stars
How It Works:
The ReviewBuzz reputation management software is similar to most other review generation platforms in that it automates the review generation process. It allows service professionals to automatically send requests for reviews after appointments and also encourages a company to offer incentives to its employees to ask customers to leave reviews on popular websites such as Google, Facebook, Better Business Bureau, and more. Once you choose and prioritize the review sites you want, the system automatically directs customers to the one that works for them.
Who It’s For: Service professionals
Major Benefits:
- It features a dashboard that tracks KPIs of your company and team members
- It includes free ReviewBuzz cards—business cards that prompt customers to leave reviews
- It offers immediate customer support
- It integrates with most apps that service professionals use like ServiceTitan and FieldEdge
- It sends automatic review prompts and allows business owners to track customer sentiment and technician performance
- It sends poor reviews straight to you so you can act quickly to rectify them
How Much It Costs: $147 per month and up
Do You Get a Free Trial? Yes
ReviewTrackers: Average of 4.8 Stars
How It Works: ReviewTrackers helps businesses track major review sites like Google and Facebook as well as industry-specific sites like TripAdvisor, Cars.com, and OpenTable.
Apart from gathering reviews, ReviewTrackers not only generates and track reviews, but it also collects positive commentaries from actual customers. It tracks every store location’s performance separately, helping business owners determine and address problems quickly. Its reporting and analytics tools allow you to assess performance as well as respond to online comments. One unique feature is the built-in Customer Feedback Tool, which enables users to send review requests to their happiest customers.
Who It’s For: All businesses
Major Benefits:
- It has a user-friendly and intuitive dashboard
- It features customer feedback landing pages and a Hootsuite integration
- It provides daily scanning for new reviews
- It offers multi-location reporting and analytics suite
- It has a white label option
- It features a single dashboard where you can see a snapshot of performance and keep track of performance by location
How Much It Costs: Packages start at $49 per month
Do You Get a Free Trial? Yes
Customer Lobby: Average of 4.7 Stars
How It Works: After you install the Direct Connect app, it automatically syncs with your invoicing system to analyze your customer data. This enables you to analyze business patterns, use AI to predict when customers will need service, and automatically send postcards, emails, and review requests at optimal times. Each postcard and email is branded for your business and personalized to the customer. Your customers automatically get different images, messages, and offers over time. When your customers complete a transaction, it automatically asks them for a review on your major platforms like Google, Facebook, etc.
Who It’s For: Local businesses
Major Benefits:
- It features the capability to use AI to predict when specific customers will need service again and send an automated postcard, which can help you reduce unnecessary mail costs and maximize repeat business
- It features the ability to set up specific campaigns to target only certain customers
- It tracks each customer for 90 days after they receive a postcard and email—and when they come back for service, it tells you their name, date of the transaction, and how much they spent
- It can auto-post good reviews to your social media profiles and your website
- It sends postcards as well as online review requests
How Much It Costs: $179 – $999 per month
Do You Get a Free Trial? No
TrustPilot: Average of 4.6 Stars
How it Works: Trustpilot is a review management tool that helps online businesses build and manage their reputation by collecting, monitoring, and publishing reviews. Businesses use Trustpilot to improve customer experience, stand out more in search engines, increase conversions and sales on-site, and build a trusted reputation. It’s one of the better-known review generation platforms and has a large community of users.
Who It’s For: Ecommerce companies
Major Benefits:
- It has several options to generate reviews, including email and text prompts, embedded review forms, and automatic invitations
- Customizable email templates
- Offers tracking and analytics to monitor and improve review rates
- Has a feature to showcase high review scores with a TrustBox, which has been proven to increase basket size, decrease cart abandonment, and boost conversion rates up to 58%
- It has an option to optimize review invitations
- It has an easy-to-use interface
- It enables rich snippets
- It offers many integrations including Google Seller Ratings and Shopping ads
- You can enable social sharing
- It can feature product reviews
How Much It Costs: From $299 per month to $549 a month
Do You Get a Free Trial? Yes
How to Choose the Best Customer Review Platform for Your Business
With all the options you have for review generation services, it can be difficult choosing the review generation tool that’s best for your business. While they’ll all get the job done, specific platforms are better for specific industries than others. For example, Nearby Now and NiceJob are well-suited to service professionals, while TrustPilot is a good option for ecommerce companies.
The best way to choose which review generation platform is best for your business is to identify your top pain points first. Where do you have the most difficulty? Is it the actual asking for reviews, or is it that you need a more reliable way to track overall customer sentiment? Once you isolate your main problems, it’s a lot easier to narrow down which platform would be best.
Need help with online review generation? Contact us, and we’re more than happy to help.
About The Author: Blue Corona's Editorial Staff is determined to help you increase your leads and sales, optimize your marketing costs, and differentiate your brand by passing on our tribal knowledge. The team vigilantly stays on top of the latest in digital marketing, bringing you the top insights with expert commentary. Want to see something on our blog you haven't seen yet? Shoot us an email and our marketing team will get to work.
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