It’s no secret that consumers are relying on reviews in their decision making process today more than ever. But a franchise’s online reputation can play an important part in franchise sales as well.
Research shows that serious franchisee candidates do a lot of online research when considering an opportunity. Naturally online reviews will affect their impression of the brand and their desire to be a part of it.
Providing a great product or service is the first step in receiving for positive reviews. But how can businesses ensure that they are consistently collecting those reviews from their customers? We met with Sebastian Aguirre, the Franchise Relationships Manager at NiceJob to discuss how franchisors can automate this process.
LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE:
Juliette – Sparktank
Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. I want to introduce Sebastian Aguirre. I’m very excited to speak to Sebastian today. He is the franchise relationships manager at NiceJob.
And in case you haven’t heard of NiceJob, they are a cutting edge software, reputation management software that is utilized by many franchise brands to enhance their online reputation. So the reason that this topic is very interesting, I think for our audience is that when franchisees are looking to potentially purchase a franchise, one of the things that is very important is your online reputation. And there actually have been studies that have come out to show that serious franchise candidates tend to do a lot of research on a brand prior to even sort of making a decision if they kind of want to move forward, which makes sense. When you’re, you know, in some cases it could be, if it’s a very large, well-known brand, then there’s maybe less of a need for that. But when it comes to sort of emerging brands, and even large brands really, people are going to look around, see who are these people, do I want to be part of this team, do I want to represent this brand, and online reputation plays a huge part in that. So I think this is a very relevant topic. It’s something that will enhance your marketing to kind of get people to build that trust and confidence and wanting to move forward.
So we’re going to go ahead and start talking about this topic. So Sebastian. Let’s talk about how a strong online reputation impacts the perception of a franchise brand and its attractiveness to potential franchisees.
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Well, thank you very much for the very well question about potential franchisees looking into buying into a brand. We can definitely say, Juliet, that in today’s business landscape, where digital information molds consumers’ purchasing habits, viewpoints, a franchise or has to have not just an online presence but robust online presence. And the reason this is because online, you have a reputation and everybody’s watching. With so much information and information that’s available to people, we find that franchisors that have a robust online presentation based on their Google reviews have a higher percentage of being reliable and trustworthy.
And this is what instills that confidence to those prospects or individuals that are looking to buy into a franchise brand, making them more comfortable in choosing a particular brand. The illustration that we always use when it comes to having an online reputation media or how do you say, a repertoire, is basically if you’re in a room, with a lot of people having an online representation or a robust online reputation, is like a spotlight on you in that crowded room. So basically it’s kind of like you’re calling attention to yourself, but also prospects are looking at you. And what you want these prospects to say is, hey, this brand is really good and I wanna be a part of it.
Juliette – Sparktank
Yeah, absolutely. And if you think about someone who’s thinking, okay, maybe I’ll be the next owner of this particular location, they wanna have those positive reviews that their fellow franchisees are having. So if they see, okay, people are happy with this service, people like this brand, they’re gonna feel good about wanting to be part of that. They’re gonna say, I wanna be the next one who’s getting all these great reviews. And it also shows that there’s been an effort made to get reviews and the fact that people are giving positive reviews. It just makes it really just, I think it’s such an important factor, not only in the way they feel about it, but then obviously in terms of sales too, right?
So it’s, I think it’s so important. Okay, so what are the potential consequences of negative online reputation on franchise sales and how can franchisers effectively manage and mitigate these risks?
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Well, just as a positive review motivates a prospect into buying into a franchise, of course, a negative review is going to create the opposite effect, right? It’s going to deter that individual from considering into buying into that opportunity. Sadly, when negative reviews are unresolved, or if you see complaints online or unfavorable discussions about the brand and you see this straight from the feed of this brand This can deeply affect the credibility of the brands business that’s why it’s so important to mitigate these risks and one of the ways we recommend to do this is have the franchise or prioritize delivering exceptional value and great experiences for the clients, right? You wanna give them that wow experience. And why do we say this? Because if you provide an excellent experience along with great products, it’s most likely that people are gonna write positive reviews when you ask them, right? So when they write about great experiences, let’s say they had a really good time eating at your restaurant and they write about this, those are the words or the reviews they’re gonna build that credibility or trust, right? We can’t emphasize this enough because when a brand delivers exceptional value, it’s almost 99% guaranteed that you will get a positive review. So this is one of the best ways to mitigate those negative online perceptions.
Juliette – Sparktank
Yeah, I agree. And I think like even from my personal experience, even if I’ve, say, gone to a restaurant and something got messed up, let’s say, you know, they overcooked my steak or, you know, something, I don’t know, the waiter spilled something on me, you know, I think if the person working at the restaurant has been trained to handle those situations by being really polite, you know, potentially apologizing, maybe they’re giving you a free dessert or something like that, I actually come away even feeling even better about the brand. And so I almost want to write a positive review because they really made an effort to kind of make up for whatever happened, right?
And then I guess, also from my perspective, as a person who checks out a lot of services and reads their reviews, what I find is that if I see two negative reviews and I see 30 excellent reviews, I always take the negative ones with a grain of salt. Because you kind of know there’s some people who just sometimes are a little negative. And I see that there’s 30 people who have said this place is excellent. And I know from being in business for many years that you have to balance that out. So what are your thoughts about A, responding to reviews, and B, increasing the amount of reviews you get so that there’s that balance?
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Well, the main objective for any business owner is always to be transparent. When you write a very honest review, and maybe you weren’t happy with the stake, but the business owner writes back and addresses the problem or the issue, but also writes it in such a way where there’s that tonality of customer service. But also you open the conversation to that transparency of, well, how can we improve our service? We find that those reviews are very powerful because let’s say you have several one-star reviews, but the business owner or the franchisee rates it in such a way that there’s engagement. Those reviews can really speak highly of your brand, your location, but above all your customer service. And to be honest, if you have a thousand good, you know, five-star reviews, but you have a handful of them, it only makes sense that those one-star reviews help you speak highly of your service. So usually when there’s those types of conversations, people will hone in on that and see, wow, okay, they really care about the customer service or the product that they’re offering. And yes, maybe there was an issue with cooking the steak, but I’ll still go in and enjoy that meal with my family. So the review is like a conversation that you can have with your clients. And as long as you’re transparent, you will always succeed in that aspect.
Juliette – Sparktank
Yeah, and I think also, you know, the idea that you can gather more reviews so that there is that balance. And I’m sure, you know, we’ll get into talking a little more about what NiceJob does and how it works. But obviously, you know, part of having reputation management software and having a kind of a regular process within your business of gathering reviews will help to increase the number of reviews. So you don’t just have those two negative ones and no other reviews coming in, never really asked for them, right? So that’s, I guess, another piece is just kind of getting enough reviews in to be able to show the proper balance of how, you know, happy people are overall, right? Yeah. Okay. Um, so there are a number of ways for customers to leave reviews on businesses. These days, there’s many different review sites. Of course, Google is, is probably the, I would assume the biggest one out there. Are there any review platforms that stand out as being more influential in the franchise sales process or just in general in terms of how much visibility they get?
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Well, that’s a great question. It really depends on the franchise industry in the franchise space and where your prospects are searching. For example, Google reviews, as you mentioned, is one of the first places prospects turn to when researching a franchise brand. And even though there are numerous review sites out there, we have noticed with our clients that Google and Facebook are the go-to platforms. And the reason why is because their review system is very authentic and it’s honest. If let’s say an individual is looking to research a brand that is not necessarily on Google per se, you can definitely go to other platforms to do your research.
I’ll give you an example. A prospective franchisee might look into the hospitality industry. They would go to TripAdvisor. If they’re looking for home improvement services, they’ll go to the house platform. And so those are just two examples of review platforms that are out there. And depending on the hotel industry, the home service space, or the food space, there’s different platforms that you can go to.
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
There’s a lot of research tools to get your data. So when you feel confident to say, hey, maybe I do wanna invest in this hotel, or maybe I do wanna invest into this restaurant, you’ll have a clear view of the brand, its services, and you’ll feel more confident in becoming part of it.
Juliette – Sparktank
Great, absolutely. So is it challenging using software like NiceJob to try to get those reviews on all those sort of smaller review sites, like if you’re talking about TripAdvisor, for example, versus say Google or Facebook? Is that sort of more of a manual process? Like how do you get those reviews on all those various websites?
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Very good question. So NiceJob actually can work with different review platforms and we actually encourage to space your reviews throughout each platform and not just on Google. One, because it makes your brand more authentic. And two, you can kind of spread out all those social proofing reviews across the internet. And that will mean that more prospects will have higher chances of finding you if they’re looking into your brand.
Juliette – Sparktank
Yeah, and I just thought of something I noticed sometimes when, say I’m looking at a business online and it’ll have their Google listing and it will show the summary of the Google reviews, but then it’ll say reviews on other websites on the internet. I noticed that. So that’s a nice feature in terms of you’re still finding everything in one central place, which is through Google Maps and local listings, but you’re actually seeing a summary that’s giving you a very balanced picture of what’s happening on the internet with this brand.
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, there’s also I forgot to mention too if there are a ton of directories for franchisees. For example, there’s the franchise chatter, franchise gator, and franchise direct. And those are like three out of 10 to 20 platforms just in the franchise industry. So not only can you go to Google, but you can also go to these directories, you will find a ton of information about these brands. So yeah, compared to 30 years ago, there’s so much valuable information now that you can get educated on when it comes to purchasing and getting into a brand.
Juliette – Sparktank
Right, yeah, that’s very true. And like you said, it really depends on your industry in terms of which ones are more influential, right? So, yeah, so I guess this kind of leads me to my next question, which is, how can franchisors encourage customers to leave online reviews? What are some tools they can use to create a process for that?
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Well, the answer I’m about to give is very similar to the one of the first questions you asked. And this is what we always tell our clients. How do you encourage customers to leave a review? Well, we call it the foundation and it’s encouraging customers by giving consistent customer service.
You know, again, if you give that wow customer service of your brand or the product, you’re definitely going to get a review, right? Because people, when they’re content, they’re gonna write something positive about you. And there’s many ways you can actually do it. Once you give the customer service, you can request a review simply after the completion of the service, or you can do a follow-up call to that client and just remind them, can you write a review for me? And because now we live in an era where there’s so many avenues of requesting reviews, there’s a Google review cards available. Also, some businesses will notice that they’ll grab a link and embed it into a receipt. So when they send you, let’s say the invoice or the receipts to your email inbox, you can actually access the review platform straight from your inbox. So there are a lot of ways that you can request reviews nowadays.
Juliette – Sparktank
Yeah, it feels like you should really create an automated, or at least semi-audited, if not automated process for that, just to ensure that you don’t miss any, right? Because it can easily fall through the cracks and it’s so important. So I feel like, you know, if there is some sort of a trigger, I mean, through, for example, a CRM or something along those lines to kind of, you know, boom, you know, this next step is to ask for a review, you know, fairly soon after the service or the service or the product is given. It seems like that would make a lot of sense just to, and also it’s a benefit for the franchisee to have something like that in place, right?
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Yeah, and NiceJob has that feature where we’ll integrate your CRM with our software. So let’s say a plumber or a company that’s in plumbing completes the job. And once they send out the invoice, our integration will send out that review trigger with it. So as soon as they get the invoice, the person or the client will get that review asked through a text message or an email, and we call that the peak point of excitement. So because they’re so excited, that’s the best moment to ask for a review. And we find that we get the review, and that’s why we can guarantee the 75% reviews from our software.
Juliette – Sparktank
That’s so true. Yeah. But I think that is so important. The timing, people get so busy. If you ask for a review, I mean, I get requests for reviews constantly via email and I could spend all day giving reviews. But if I got it right after the service happened and I feel I want to give back to anything, I will tend to do it right away. And if it’s also done in a way that’s made it very easy for me, then I think that really helps too. So let’s see. One of the things that I think is a challenge with reputation management and reviews is there are companies who have been accused of generating fake positive reviews. I mean, that’s something that you hear about in the online reputation world.
That’s obviously a huge threat to the reputation management world because we want to ensure that online reviews are trusted. It’s extremely important that, you know, the reputation of reputation management, you know, stays intact. So what are some things that we can do to ensure that online reviews continue to be trusted?
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
That’s an excellent question. Well, first to start, it’s interesting. We have a lot of conversations with our clients and we also do intensive market research. And what we found is that this trend of competitors creating fake reviews to maybe ruin your reputation is not a common practice as one would think. And the reason being is because nowadays, a lot of review platforms have strict rules to identify fake reviews. Those rules are evolving and they’re getting more strict. And so how are these companies doing this? Well, most of them, first of all, have regulations that involve advanced algorithms that have processes in place to sift out any authentic content. And now with the use of AI, these systems can analyze patterns, language, and review history. And so it’s easier for these platforms to identify fake reviews. So one would think it’s a very common practice, but really it’s not. But there are cases where some of our, let’s say clients, feel, well, if it is a common practice, can I create another layer of protection to protect my online reputation. And the answer is, yes, you can. You can do it in three ways. One of them is to encourage your customers to leave reviews on multiple platforms. By doing this, you’re going to leverage your credibility. Number two is respond authentically to your reviews. Make it seem like it is a human on the other end, you know, use genuine tone, genuine language. And three, you can hire third party review services. And these companies, what they do is they specialize in verifying these fake reviews. So you can hire a company to do this. But in reality, from what we see in the industry, it’s not a common practice.
Juliette – Sparktank
Okay, that’s really good to hear. I’ve sometimes seen people getting a negative review and the reply was, I don’t see you on our customer list, which I think is, it’s not really being defensive, which I think is good, but it’s also sort of that person standing up for their reputation, because it’s very harmful, obviously, for someone to say something negative that’s not true.
People are getting smarter. This software is getting smarter. Google is getting smarter Okay, there were all you know, Google is well known for being able to suss out You know, whether it’s fake SEO or whether it’s fake reviews I think they’re you know They’re always trying to keep that credibility of their system intact because it’s obviously in their best interest So I think that between software and then you know people understanding how to respond if that does come up I think it it’s kind of going to filter that out over time. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what are some things that people can do to automate the online review process? So we kind of touched on this a little earlier about how to create a system within a franchise, for example, or any business really, to ensure that request for review happens each time. So I know, again, we kind of touched on this a little earlier, but maybe if you want to elaborate on that a little bit and maybe, maybe you can talk a little more about how NiceJob helps with that.
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Correct. Yeah, maybe I can break this question into three mini sections because they’re very tied together and going back to collecting or let’s say a competitor writes a fake review, let’s say, right? One of the other protections that you can build for your business and how you automate this process. Why? Because when you set an automated system, other competitors won’t be able to keep up with you. So you won’t have to worry about them leaving a bad review. Why? Because if you collect so many positive reviews, these reviews will grab these handful of negative reviews and they’re gonna make less of an impact because they’re gonna get buried in your feed.
To give you an example, we worked with a company called YouMoveMe, and this is one of our success case studies that we truly enjoy sharing because it proves the importance of automating the system. When YouMoveMe came to us to NiceJob, they had 4,000 reviews across their 19 locations. After a year of working with us, they currently have over 25,000 reviews. So, which is amazing because they fortified and built a fort, so to speak, with positive reviews. And this is just one example. NiceJob has actually helped so many companies that we’ve collected over 2 million reviews for these businesses. So it’s kind of like you build a defense system against those negative views. Because so many people are speaking so highly of you, people won’t really pay attention to those negative reviews. So that’s another way that you can kind of leverage and protect your online reputation.
Juliette – Sparktank
Right?
So I have a question. So when You Move Me came to you, and I’m very familiar with You Move Me, they’re actually a company that was started, their parent company was started in Vancouver where we’re based. And they’re a great company, they have a lot of great brands. So was there a goal when they came to you to deal with balancing out their reviews because of negative reviews, or was it more of like, we just know how important this is, we wanna kind of keep this piece, this part of our reputation and growing, what was their motivation?
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
So the story behind this account is pretty great. Originally, out of the 19 locations, one had approached us, right? And they said, I just wanna build my online reputation. So we started working with that one franchise location, and then over time, the word started to spread amongst the other owners. And they’re like, what are you doing to get so many reviews? I want that.
So then the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth location got NiceJob. Eventually head office heard about what was going on and they said, well, if you guys are doing so well, why don’t we just adopt the software for the entire company or the other locations as well?
So eventually all 19 locations came to a NiceJob. We aggregated the system and we worked with them behind the scenes to help them boost not only their online reputation, but collect those positive reviews. So over time, over a year and a year and a half, we’ve seen this company grow exponentially. And even to us, you know, we had our expectations and in the end it was exceeded. So this is why we always share this success story because you never know how one location can attract the entire franchise brand. And going back to your first question, Juliet, when you have a brand that adopts an automated system like NiceJob, then when people or potential prospects research the brand and they see that 19 locations have such a robust presence online, that is when they’re enticed and motivated to buy into the location. So YouMoveMe is expanding because of those Google reviews.
Juliette – Sparktank
Yeah, that’s like thank you for bringing that full circle. Cause that really is what motivated me to want to have this talk because we work, you know, with, we work with many brands on, you know, franchise sales. And we just know how there’s so many pieces that help with what we’re doing. So we’re, you know, we’re focusing on creating marketing materials for, for franchise sales and lead generation. But we know that there’s so many different pieces that will help with that person deciding to fill out that form and then deciding to tie that first conversation and deciding to go to the next step in the discovery call and so on. So, you know, that’s why I felt this topic was so important, just because we want people to be successful and we know how important reputation management is. And I know that you guys work with a lot of franchises, so that’s great.
We’re definitely going to put your information in our blog post. We’ll put a link to NiceJob so people can inquire and find out, you know, what services you guys offer. I’m sure you have lots of different packages that you offer. So we’ll definitely include that. Is there anything else you wanted to add or anything about, you know, how reputation management affects franchise sales?
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Yeah, and I actually forgot to answer the last snippet of the question, the other one, to bring it full circle. And because there’s so many moving parts, like you say, Juliet, there’s so many moving parts in the franchise space. And going back to what NiceJob does for automating the process, for franchise owners, they leave, they lead busy lives. They don’t have time to be collecting those reviews. So NiceJob in a nutshell, why it makes it so special is that we just have four touch points when asking for a review. So when the first text message goes out, and let’s say it doesn’t get answered because somebody’s busy or they’re like, I’m gonna get to it later tomorrow or whenever I’m available, individuals forget. So our system sends three follow ups to remind them, hey, would you be able to write a review for me? And that’s why we can guarantee those 75% reviews because that metric has been proven based on research that that’s the perfect number to request a review without being aggressive.
Juliette – Sparktank
Very interesting. That’s very interesting. So you’re saying 75% of the people you reach out to will actually respond to the survey request type of review request, I guess.
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Correct, yeah. Yeah.
Juliette – Sparktank
Okay, okay, very interesting, very interesting. Okay, that’s great. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today. This was really very valuable. And I think this is such an important topic for people who are looking to do franchise sales. So again, we’ll put all your information in the article. And yeah, look forward to speaking with you again, hopefully soon.
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Yeah, thank you so much, Julian. It was a pleasure.
Juliette – Sparktank
Okay, take care.
Sebastian Aguirre – NiceJob
Bye bye.
