Reflecting on a Decade+ of ReviewTrackers

Over the last 11 years, ReviewTrackers has evolved its platform from simple review management to a full online reputation management suite. Brands need to leverage more of their data, listings, and feedback to provide a better customer experience and ReviewTrackers continues to meet those needs. Chris Campbell, ReviewTrackers CEO and founder, spent some time reflecting on the growth of ReviewTrackers over the past 11 years – including ReviewTrackers’ recent acquisition by parent company InMoment.

“ReviewTrackers has made HUGE strides in the past few years in our product,” he said, “but the wild part is that it still aligns with our original vision of making it beyond simple for our business customers to manage, analyze and take action based on the feedback from their customers.”

Rooted in Reviews

That vision came from the original problem that brought ReviewTrackers into existence: helping local businesses better manage and track their online reviews. To this day, reviews remain at the heart of ReviewTrackers, with over 256 million reviews collected on the platform since its inception. One notable brand benefitting from ReviewTrackers’ suite of products is farm supply brand Rural King, which has over 250,000 reviews in the platform alone. Another brand, UK-based hospitality group HGEM pores over 345,000 reviews when their team logs onto ReviewTrackers.

Using reviews as the foundation of the ReviewTrackers platform wasn’t by accident.

“I was pitching a large franchise business and just by random luck, I clicked on an example of a review,” Campbell said. “The potential customer realized that the franchise owner had written the review themselves and that’s when it clicked for them: ‘We need to start educating our franchises and better manage this new communication channel with customers.’”

The realization of just how important review and reputation management is for a brand helped ReviewTrackers gain its first customer, which is still using the platform to this day.

“Our first customer was a retail cheese store based in Seattle, and I can proudly say they are still a customer today,” Campbell said. “We were able to solve what was at the time a time consuming task for their team and we automated it to save them several hours a day of manual work.”

Elevating Review Management

That manual task Campbell mentioned includes multiple aspects of reviews such as monitoring, response, and acquisition. In the past, teams would have to scour multiple business review sites one at a time, triage review responses strategies, and create varied multiple methods of requesting feedback from recent customers that may or may not have worked. ReviewTrackers allows customers to fully automate that process without losing the human elements of online review management.

Thanks to the Ask Tool, which allows for distribution of review requests through a number of channels, ReviewTrackers users have sent over 26 million review requests to their customers via email and SMS. Customers also took advantage of the platform’s review response features with over 5 million responses sent to customers.

Creating and innovating on many review-based features is a tried-and-true strategy for ReviewTrackers, and specific features continue to delight customers through the years. Atlanta restaurant group Ted’s Montana Grill used the Ask Tool and grew reviews by 22% over a 6-month period. In the Pacific Northwest, outdoor gear retailer evo used ReviewTrackers’ review response features and reduced its response time to 1.3 days.

“Our product team has continued to innovate and enable us to have a best-in-class product,” said Campbell.

“Our two fastest adopted features are our review response generator (Smart Response), which automatically generates suggested review responses, saving our customers time. The second is Amplify, a website review widget suite enabling our customers to proudly display all their best reviews, testimonials, and outstanding reputations online.”

These tactics help brands serve the valuable social proof consumers need to not just make a purchase decision but also to become a loyal and happy customer. In its first year, the average overall rating of ReviewTrackers’ customers was 3.71 stars. Ten years later, that overall average rating has increased to 4.27 stars, and customers continue to praise the ReviewTrackers platform.

• “Comments from customers are so valuable. With ReviewTrackers, we have learned more about why customers love Rural King.” – Kirk Waidelich, VP of marketing at Rural King
• “ReviewTrackers has allowed us to boost our star rating on Google and effectively get more traffic to our website from our Google My Business listing.” – Paige Shearer, marketing manager at Ted’s Montana Grill
• “The flexibility of the ReviewTrackers platform, along with the support team’s ability to clearly explain changes and updates to individual review websites, have been very helpful as we continue to grow our brand online.” – Brett Murphy, regional operation educator for Wood Partners

“A financial customer did some testing and based on their own internal data, they learned that locations that were active on our platform and took action on the data, increased sales by about 9% on average,” Campbell said. “They have been a loyal and dedicated customer ever since.”

Comprehensive Reputation Management

In recent years ReviewTrackers continues to innovate with the goal of giving brands more power to optimize their online reputation.

This includes natural language processing technology, which has already analyzed over 45 million reviews for hidden insights that can improve the customer experience, as well as local listing management tools that provide action items for brands to further optimize their digital footprint for better customer acquisition and the chance to beat local competitors.

New updates also expanded a brand’s review management scope, which now allows for in-depth analysis of reviews with photos. The Ask Tool was also expanded to include Microsurveys, which enables companies to gather detailed feedback alongside a review rating. In addition, numerous enhancements are constantly added to existing features to help teams get even more accurate, actionable insights that convert to long-term success.

ReviewTrackers Becomes Part of the Customer Experience Space through Acquisition by InMoment

In June 2022, ReviewTrackers was acquired by InMoment, a leader in the Experience Improvement space. The acquisition means that the ReviewTrackers platform can continue to offer business solutions for brands looking to elevate their online reputation and customer retention and acquisition programs while also assisting with InMoment’s goal of providing a comprehensive look at the customer experience through even more structured and unstructured data points along the customer journey, including reviews and social media.

Campbell and the ReviewTrackers team will look into more ways to help companies better manage their online reputation, improve the customer experience, and beat the competition.

“We are making massive investments into expanding our platform for the next evolution of this industry,” he said. “We have more than doubled our investment in R&D for new products to help us build the next generation of products to help local businesses manage, analyze and take action on the feedback to their customers. This drives more new customers and stronger retention of existing customers by utilizing our platform.”