Incentivizing staff for each review that you can attribute to them is the oldest trick in the book to grow reviews. And it's very powerful.
So powerful, that a solid half of all businesses use it. Podium claims they surveyed their customers on the topic, and report 56% of respondents actively incentivize their employees for collecting reviews.
We ran a survey of our own on a community of Tour Operators, and got the exact opposite results – although it's still very close to half. This is based on 68 respondents.
The other section is mostly made of business owners reporting "smarter" incentives mostly using contests. Winner takes all rather than everyone takes a little kind of thing.
In general, it certainly feels like if you're not incentivizing your staff for reviews, your competitors likely are.
Are you allowed to incentivize your staff for reviews?
Yes, for most platforms, you absolutely can.
Some platforms (like Google) fight against incentivizing customers directly. But this isn't like you're buying reviews.
Your staff can only ask, and you're just nudging them to ask more.
The odd Tripadvisor case
Tripadvisor is the only platform to claim that it's against their terms of service to incentivize your staff to ask for reviews. In fact, they claim that it's against their terms of service to "solicit reviews" i.e. ask for reviews.
See for yourself (source)
Of course, this is absolute B.S. written by people who never stepped outside of an office, and everyone asks for Tripadvisor reviews in the real world.
Incentivizing staff members for reviews: pros & cons
1. Pro: you'll know who's performing, and who needs coaching
The first and main advantage to incentivizing your staff for every review they collect is that it'll force you to keep tabs on who's getting what reviews.
Whether you have them assign reviews to themselves, get your customers to mention their names, or lookup the customer names to find out who they were in touch with, the immediate consequence is you'll know who's performing, and who needs coaching.
If you're concerned about how to do this, there are ways to export your customer reviews to Excel to make your life easier, or more advanced solutions that can track staff member mentions automatically (including typos, etc) in your customer reviews. Reviewflowz is one of them.
2. Pro: It's immediate, and usually fair
Another advantage of direct incentives for each review is that it's just that: direct
Some business owners prefer more creative incentives like weekly or monthly contests, where the winner gets anything from cash rewards to flying to an annual conference with the business owner.
These creative incentives can be very powerful in building cohesion and aligning the value created with the rewards better than "basic" cash-per-review incentives.
However, it typically requires a lot more animation to keep people focused on the objective over longer periods of time. If you run a quarterly contest for example, there's a solid chance the first month of every quarter will be significantly lower.
This can also create competition, which can be friendly sure, but can also become counter-productive.
In general, if you're not sure where to start, don't overthink it, and go with simple direct incentives. If $5 doesn't cut it, increase it to $10 and see where that gets you.
3. Con: Quality vs Quantity tradeoff
The main drawback of incentivizing per review is that you might end up with many very short reviews, or even reviews with no content on Google.
The problem is those reviews weigh less. Also, on Google, the keywords mentioned in your reviews help your business rank on those keywords. For example, if people keep saying the place is romantic in their customer reviews, your restaurant will end up ranking high when people search for a "romantic restaurant" on Google Maps.
In general, getting reviews is only half the battle. You want those reviews to actually drive customers to your doors.
The thing is your staff will likely end up trying to game the incentive. And this might mean poor quality reviews. Especially if they're inexperienced. They might tell your customers that a few words are enough, insist on the fact that it's quick & easy, etc.
This is actually a very ineffective way of collecting more reviews, and it's much more effective to time the request properly, and to work on the pitch (train your staff !!) but you'll have a very hard time proving that.
There are two ways you can sort of counteract that
Define guard-rails. Define what a review needs to have to qualify for the incentive. For example, a certain number of words, or at least 3 keywords from a pre-defined list, or some photos, etc. Keep in mind however that effective incentives need to be simple.
Frame the objective as a percentage of review collection instead of a sheer number of reviews, Assign a top-line as well to each staff member. For example, the number of customer conversations they had. Ultimately, it's just semantics, but whenever we look at conversion rates, the brain immediately thinks quality is the driving factor.
4. Con: It's not enough
This isn't really a proper disadvantage, but it's important to mention.
Offering incentives for new reviews might work out of the box, but it might also not work as well as intended, and it might point to deeper problems the business might be having.
Take it as a starting point!