How To Cultivate 5 Star Reviews

Introduction

Real estate is a tricky business to break into — a lot of competitors, no guarantee of success — and for many agents, it feels like the only way to advance further is to endlessly and manually find clients. But what if there’s a different way? A way that generates 5-Star reviews and helps you achieve blockbuster sales?

In this seventeenth episode of The Process podcast, Adele Gutman, one of the Top 25 Most Extraordinary Minds in Sales & Marketing, shares her proven method for improving client experience and creating strategic relationships that can yield more revenue for you! Tune in to find out how she overcame her own frustrations with negative feedback and what she learned along the way.

Discover the secret to earning and inspiring 5-star client reviews! 

Get to know Adele Gutman

Adele Gutman has been honored as one of the Top 25 Most Extraordinary Minds in Sales & Marketing by the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International for achieving exceptional results and driving revenue through Guest Experience and Reputation Cultivation. She formerly was the vice president of the library hotel collection and achieved the highest guest satisfaction rating of any luxury hotel brand in the world. And this is based on around 2.7 million reviews and had a ninth overall 96.1 satisfaction rate. Hence, Adele is an authority on hospitality Reputation Marketing as she has developed a five-star review system.

She had responsibility for anything that impacts the revenue of the business for properties. And she wanted to go online and make sure that what people were saying about them on different websites was up to date. In doing so, she started noticing reviews becoming a thing. She wanted to ensure that people will pay more attention to what other people say about them than what they say about themselves. So she wanted to make sure that everybody is saying great things about them. And by and large, their hotels were inspiring a lot of five-star reviews. 

Now, Adele is available to help hoteliers, healthcare professionals, and all service industries implement the award-winning Five Star Review System she developed over decades in hospitality.

Cultivating 5-Star Reviews

Reviews have forever changed how consumers make purchasing decisions. A lot of times, you can just mitigate the problem or diminish its impact of the problem. One is around reviews. One is reputation management, versus reputation cultivation.

You may have a negative review but respond in a polite and professional way. And that’s reputation management, that’s never going to lift your guests’ experience scores, or your patient experience scores or your student or membership experience scores. It’s never going to change you will be managing forever and not really accomplishing anything. If you want to take your business from wherever it is to wherever you want it to go. You have to call to vacate that experience for them by being what you want to be known for. If you want a good reputation, endeavor to be what you want. 

That’s how you get to be a business that inspires five-star reviews every day, all day long. And when you do have a negative review, you don’t see it as a problem or something to hide. You see it as an opportunity for creativity and innovation.

If you work together with your team, they will learn how important it is to you to be creative and innovative, to be on a road to continuous improvement every day, they will learn that that is the culture of the business, they’re in that you want them to constantly be thinking, What can we be doing better, and they learn how to solve problems. 

The key to getting great reviews from clients is to make them feel like part of the process. When you approach a client and ask them if they would like to get their home sold or rented, it’s important that you are able to make them feel comfortable with your approach so that they will be open-minded about what kind of results would be possible for their investment. If you can get your client excited about selling or renting before even showing them any properties, then this will go a long way towards making sure that when things do go wrong (which inevitably happens), it won’t cause any major damage between both parties involved in such transactions.

Handling Negative Reviews

​​You’re in the middle of working on your business and getting great feedback from your clients. Then suddenly, one person gives you a bad review. This can be frustrating and even make you rethink whether or not you’re doing something wrong. It can be very disheartening to have this sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that everything is just not working out for you.

It’s important that you don’t let this deter you, if anything it should teach you a valuable lesson that will help the next client experience be even more positive. Try to overcome your negative experiences with negative feedback to develop an effective method of nurturing relationships with your clients and generating more client referrals.

While it is not really necessary to tally up your reviews, it’s still important to acknowledge them. What you do with them is up to you—you can look at the total number of reviews as a measuring stick of your success, or you can ignore them altogether. At the end of the day, if you’re providing your clients with the experience they want, more reviews will come in time. So keep providing great work, and eventually, your reputation will soar.