Client reviews are so essential to the growth of your firm. It only takes one bad review to sway a potential client from reaching out to you.
How you handle your reviews, negative or positive, will play a role in your firm’s success. Sometimes a potential client will only have your Google profile, website or your social media account to go by when determining whether or not to procurer your service.
In this week’s #FollowAttorneyAmanda, Amanda talks about the ups and downs of online client reviews.
Follow this video and see how Amanda handles client reviews.
Video Transcript
Amanda Shaffer: Hi, I’m Attorney Amanda Shaffer. Today I want to talk about client reviews. Apart from a web series, I do call notable approvals where I talk about a case that we got approved. I would say client reviews are our other biggest marketing tool. A lot of clients who call us, will say, “Hey, we saw all these good reviews on here. We have like 60ish Google reviews and all but two are five stars. They can be frustrating with reviews, two of the ones that are not five stars are one star in there. One was somebody who wrote it on every same review for like every, Shapiro award they could find. And we told Google and they didn’t care. And then another one, a person called Aaron and was like, “Hey Aaron, my law partner was like, “Hey we can’t really help you. I’m sorry. I’m not going to take your money for something we can’t do. And the person didn’t like being told no. So they got mad and wrote a bad review. So you have to sometimes be careful with bad reviews because you don’t want them, obvious. You could also turn bad reviews into a positive, which we try, at least we can comment on it. So when we got the one from someone who was looking for the wrong attorney, no, we clearly responded this “You’re not our client. We asked if they would remove it. They didn’t because it’s very hard to get Google or Yelp or anyone to remove any reviews, which is really, really frustrating.
Because they’re so important. And the other one Aaron wrote back, “Look, I’m just always going to be honest, if you have a case or not, and we didn’t think you had a case, so you can like”, you know, if you don’t have any bad reviews, sometimes it can look bad, I guess. But the thing that we struggle with is getting the reviews. I do believe people when I asked them if they’ll do it and they say yes, and then they forget we don’t have a system right now to follow up. The best way to do it that I found so far for us at least, is once we get a case approval I’ll scan it. I’ll email it to the client, say, oh, look, your application was approved.
Congratulations. Here’s the link for you to leave a review for us if you were satisfied with our services. And that’s definitely worked better than in the past where we would just ask people and they randomly send it. And I think the timing, when people are really happy with you, once you have something approved is good, there are definitely people that want to do it earlier in time. Great. but I think if you can, I think we’ve had the most success that way, but we still have such a low percentage of people who actually write the reviews probably more than other places. But I’ve talked to a lot of people about this, about doing follow-ups. I don’t have the manpower right now to even do email follow-ups, and then not everybody does it through email. So sometimes it’s text messages. So it’s a lot, but if you can try to at least get once a month, then you’ll be okay. You just want to keep building. And I’ve noticed that not a lot of other people have like a million reviews either. We have a real nice amount. So I’m going to be – that’s one of the things I want to automate and work on going forward is sending those reminders. Like, I’ll do it randomly. If it’s like somebody I know who really was going to write a review, I’ll say, Hey, you know, still waiting for that, on that review. But like, you don’t want to be annoying either because you’re asking them to do something for you. So this is definitely something that I’ve been struggling with for a while. And I’m hoping when we can, even if we can just get something automated in process to send this out, which is what my goal is, then that will work otherwise, it’s a simple marketing email because you can set up emails on timers and I don’t know, there’s so many ways to do it, I’m thinking, but at this point I think my best bet is going to be to do it. I want to set up a newsletter anyway, so having automatic emails going out. So yes, client reviews, – I got two more today. I just posted them on all the social media. I do a little graphic with it. I don’t know if it makes any difference. I could just do a screenshot, but I think it looks a little nicer and it sets you apart from the other ones that attorneys are posting online. I always try to do it consistently so that same graphic every time. So it looks the same and you see this purple, we know we’re doing another client review. So, so far, like I said, it’s been working out, but I definitely, if I can figure out how to get more of them more frequently, I will definitely be doing it. So that is all today for #FollowAttorneyAmanda, I’ll see you next time.
