Ah summertime. BBQs, hanging out at the beach, and coding up new features. That’s what we’ve been doing – adding, refining and polishing GetFiveStars. If you are a customer of ours, you know we live to add value to GetFiveStars for you every day. Here are some of the things we’ve added recently.

Social Sharing

Get the word out about your business! Our new social sharing capability makes it easy to share your testimonials on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.

The sharing buttons appear automatically in your testimonials widget, making it super easy for you or your customers to share testimonials with a click of a button. Don’t worry, you get to preview it first, and we give you control over what image is shared too. (Note: You can disable social sharing in settings if you don’t want to display it).

Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Other updates and new features

Here are some of the other changes and updates we made in June:

• New Zapier triggers – Our Zapier integration continues to be popular, and now we’ve added several triggers so that you can integrate both ways – getting things into GetFiveStars and triggering events in other systems as well. As an example, you can now create a ZenDesk help ticket whenever a customer leaves you feedback below a certain score. These triggers open up tons of other possibilities too.
• Add [customer feedback] tag to Kiosk mode follow-up email – More flexibility in your follow-up emails for those of you using Kiosk mode.
• Add downloadable CSV template file in customer uploader – Now we provide a quick and easy way to download the template.
• Add online review click and count to business level export CSV – More data for those of you who prefer to download and report in Excel (but now with our Reporting Engine you probably don’t need to unless you are a real Excel Ninja!).
• Report in dashboard if SMS failed to send – Ok we meant to include this in the first place, but here it is. 🙂
• Add email option to additional reports – Now, in addition to the Performance Report, you can have the system automatically send PDFs of the Online Reviews Report and the NPS Report to a list of email recipients.
• Help bubble for tags and custom ID in Customer Profile – Guidance.
• Auto capitalize first letter of name in Kiosk Mode – Yeah this was lame and we fixed it.
• Add tags to alert email – More flexibility and customizations for your alert emails.

Next Up…

Here’s a sneak peak at what is coming soon:

• Easily switch between feedback modes – Do you want to focus on getting testimonials? Do you want to get feedback on a particular area of your business with survey questions? Or do you want to go directly for Online Reviews? With this new capability you can quickly and easily switch between three different feedback modes, tuning your outputs any time you want without having to tweak settings.
• Public testimonials page – if you don’t use our Testimonials Widget (you should!) we will make a page for you automatically, that contains your feedback and reviews and gets indexed in Google with rich snippets support.
• JavaScript Testimonials Widget Update – We’re putting the finishing touches on a new testimonials widget that will work on any platform, including Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, ASP.net, you name it, and still give you Rich Snippets in the SERPS.
• Google Knowledge Panel snapshot report – What does your business look like in the Google Knowledge Panel? What has changed? We’ll give you a regular report alerting you to any changes.
• Many other cool features baking in our labs – don’t worry, we are busy!

We take your ideas and feedback seriously, and love adding and improving capabilities in GetFiveStars every month. Did we miss your favorite feature or idea? Please let us know!

Attend Our Monthly Webinars To Catch It All

A great way to stay on top of these changes and learn more every month on customer feedback is by joining our webinars.  Register for our monthly webinar now.  In addition to signing up for the next one we have past webinars listed on the page as well as our YouTube Channel, which you should subscribe to.

Here are some highlights:

1. SMS Feedback Requests – send feedback requests to customers via SMS text messaging, which leads to much higher open rates and feedback rates in many types of businesses.
2. New Reporting Engine and New Reports – this new reporting engine enabled us to deliver much more powerful and insightful reports, including comparison reports vs other locations, date ranges, or the overall brand.
3. Tag Testimonial Widget – many customers asked for the ability to segment 1st party feedback so they can show different reviews on different parts of their site. Location specific pages are one example, and this feature makes that easy to do.
4. Social Sharing – of course this is a popular feature, and allows you to magnify the great 1st party reviews coming from your customers to tell the world how great your business is!
5. JavaScript Reviews Widget – this was a huge upgrade to our Testimonials Widget, now you can display rich snippets enabled content on your website no matter what platform it is based on, including WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, ASP.Net or any site. Also with blazing speed.
6. Expanded Online Review Monitoring – we’ve added a ton of new online review sites that you can monitor and get alerts on for your Online Reviews Report.
7. Twitter Monitoring – now you can monitor Twitter for mentions, tags and keywords so you know what customers are saying about your businesses.
8. Zapier Integration came out of beta, along with new triggers and actions. This makes integration with over 750+ apps without any coding as simple as pressing a few buttons.
9. Improved Customer Uploader – The customer uploader now allows you to map fields visually so you can import any kind of CSV or spreadsheet customer lists.
10. Feedback Modes, New Email and Landing Page Designs – this feature brings huge increases in response rates and online reviews, and makes it easy to change your focus by switching between modes with the press of a button.
11. New Email and Landing Page Designs – new professional designs for your emails and landing pages, along with tested subject lines and content to get the best response rates.
12. Streamlined Setup Wizard – the new setup wizard streamlines the setup process, and makes it easier to set up new locations quickly.

We made over 200 updates to the product in 2017. And we’re just getting started – just wait to see what we have planned for 2018!

Now that we’re heading into fall, let’s take a look at some of the capabilities we’ve been adding to GetFiveStars to help you build even better relationships with your customers. Thank you for all of your great suggestions and ideas. You can see our past history of release notes here.

Turbo-charged Testimonials Widget

We’ve completely overhauled our testimonials widget, and now it is 100% JavaScript and works on any platform – including WordPress, Wix, Weebly, SquareSpace, ASP.Net or any other content management system you may be using.

It is also much faster now. If you are not using our testimonials widget to show 1st party reviews on your website with rich snippets markup, you are missing out! More details in our blog post here.

New review monitoring sites

We now offer over 24 sites that you can monitor for online reviews.  The new additions include BBB, Houzz, Healthgrades, Glassdoor and many more. See this link for a full list of sites available for review monitoring.

Other new capabilities and fixes:

• Performance enhancements for labels – we sped up the performance of the business dashboard with many locations and labels, so now it is super fast if you are using many labels to organize lots of locations.
• Added survey score columns to business report – now the downloadable business report has columns for the survey question scores. Also added columns for rating only vs written feedback so you can tell what type of feedback was left more easily.
• Added new filter to the Customer Dashboard – to show requests that were opened, but no feedback was left.
• Short URL for SMS feedback requests – changed Feedback URL to short URL for SMS messages so now you have more room for your message.
• New Integrations Page – added a new integrations page to the Website – https://gatherup.com/integrations/
• Out of beta with Zapier – we are now officially out of beta with our Zapier integration! We’ve added new triggers and Zap templates for Mailchimp and other integrations. Expect our list to keep growing as we add new actions, triggers and templates.
• Fixes to Read Only User role – previously, the Read Only user role was not truly read only. There were a few settings and actions that could be turned on. We cleaned this up now, so a Read Only user can only view and not change anything.
• Added account name, location name, address and date to the Performance Report.
• White-label footer branding for testimonials widget, badge and emails.
• Removed the mailto: link from the feedback alerts and replaced with a direct link to leave a private response.
• Made Testimonials Widget URL clickable – so you can test out the URL directly from the settings screen instead of having to copy and paste it. It’s the little things…
• Reply alerts for public and private feedback responses – Any alerts for when a customer replies to a Private or Public response were going to the “Business Owner”. Now the email alert goes to the User email that actually left the private or public response in the first place.
• Automatically set business time zone when business is created – this was manual previously.
• Swedish translation – now all customer facing screens and emails are available in Swedish.

Beta – Feedback Mode Switching

We’re beta testing a huge new feature, which allows you to optimize the system to emphasize what type of feedback you are looking for. You can easily switch between these 3 new modes that each have different steps and options – and tune the system to get the results you want.

We’re very excited about this capability, and think you will like it too! If you want to be part of the beta, just let us know and we will get you set up.

Beta – Google Review Responses

Another new capability we’re beta testing is the ability to respond to Google reviews right from within the Reviews Report. You can authenticate your Google My Business account, and then track and respond to Google Reviews right from within GetFiveStars.

We’re looking for beta testers now, so let us know if you want to try it out.

Ok, that’s all for this month. We take your ideas and feedback seriously, and love adding and improving capabilities in GetFiveStars every month. Did we miss your favorite feature or idea? Please let us know!

Attend Our Monthly Webinars To Catch It All!

A great way to stay on top of these changes and learn more every month on customer feedback is by joining our webinars.  Register for our monthly webinar now.  In addition to signing up for the next one we have past webinars listed on the page as well as our YouTube Channel.

Here’s an update on what we’ve completed and shipped last month. Take a look, and let us know what else you’d like to see in GetFiveStars!

Tag Testimonial Widget

Probably the biggest new capability we added in May is the Tag Testimonial Widget. This new feature enables you to build out compelling content in custom dispalys for your product, service, service area or staff pages. It was guided by Mike Blumenthal and many of our SEO savvy resellers who specialize in local SEO.

The tagging is flexible and allows groupings of testimonials to be placed on the relevant webpages. It’s a great way to pair relevant customer comments with your specific service, products or areas served. With rich snippet review notation included, those pages will have an opportunity to show in Google search with review stars.

Learn more about the Tag Testimonial Widget here.

Other Product Updates

Here are some of the other changes and updates we made in May:

• Edit text over feedback box in survey questions – now you have complete control over how this question reads.
• Choose which five online review sites to monitor – more flexibility in your online review monitoring.
• Display formatting of Private and Public responses in profile – while responses to your customers were formatting nicely, we didn’t show that in our back-end. Now they are formatted in the back end too.
• Mobile menu style fixes – we cleaned up some color issues with our mobile menus.
• Send feedback requests based on local time – improving the timing of when we send feedback requests based on local time for the business.
• Updates to online review monitoring precision – we’re always improving the accuracy and timeliness of online review monitoring.
• Fix phone number asked for when option is disabled – we fixed an issue where it was still asking for mobile phone number in some situations, even when the setting was turned off.
• Reporting fixes – tweaks, updates and fixes to our new reports (thanks for all the great enthusiasm on them!)
• Add mobile phone and feedback preferences to Kiosk mode – more control over Kiosk mode.
• Optionally offer job ID on Feedback Page – some of you need the job id to show up on the feedback page, that’s an option now.
• SMS image fixes (image not being sent in test mode) – fixed an issue where the image was not included in the test message.

Features In the Works

We are working on a bunch of other new features that I can’t wait to tell you about. Here’s a sneak peak at what is coming soon:

• Switchable Feedback modes
• Social sharing
• Public testimonials page (if you don’t use the testimonial widgets)
• Google Knowledge Panel snapshot report

We take your ideas and feedback seriously, and love adding and improving capabilities in GetFiveStars every month. Did we miss your favorite feature or idea? Please let us know!

Attend Our Monthly Webinars To Catch It All

A great way to stay on top of these changes and learn more every month on customer feedback is by joining our webinars.  Register for our monthly webinar now.  In addition to signing up for the next one we have past webinars listed on the page as well as our YouTube Channel, which you should subscribe to.

Even though we’ve had great attendance at our monthly customer webinars, I realized we haven’t published our release notes in a while. We try to publish them at the beginning of each month, but I’ve missed a few 🙂

So here’s an update for you – in case you missed our customer webinars or weren’t aware of some of the new things we’ve been adding to GetFiveStars.

February Updates

In February, we released a big new capability – SMS Feedback Requests. This was one of my personal favorite projects. Many business and customers respond better to SMS than email. In fact, in many cases the open rate of SMS feedback requests is 90%+, vs 40-50% for email. We’re seeing great results – increased amount of quality feedback and more online reviews on Google, Facebook and industry specific review sites.

New Features in March

In March we made a number of refinements to SMS based on how we saw you using it. For example, since we allow you to include images with your SMS feedback requests, we eliminated image clipping issues by auto-resizing the image you upload to ensure it doesn’t get clipped.

We also made a bunch of usability improvements to the SMS Message Editor, including message size constraints to eliminate the situation where messages are too long and they get broken into multiple messages. We now provide a nice message size indicator so you know exactly how many more characters you have to work with.

Also, many of you use SMS in other countries like the UK, Australia and others, so we have been working to improve our support for these countries with local numbers and other features (who knew that you can’t send MMS messages in the UK?)

We added a number of other enhancements not related to SMS, including:

• Add mobile phone to Kiosk mode – for those of you using Kiosk mode to get customer feedback and reviews, we’ve added the ability to collect mobile phone number there now that you can send feedback requests via SMS.
• Job ID on Feedback Page – you can now optionally turn on Job ID on your feedback page, if you want to capture specific job information in your feedback request.
• API call to get survey question results – if you are using Survey Questions, now you can use our API to request the survey question results, in addition to all your other NPS, feedback and review data.
• Streamlined the “Add Customer” screen – We cleaned up the Add Customer screen so that if you add customers manually on your mobile device it is much simpler and more efficient – hiding fields that are not commonly used so you only see the essential unless you expand the advanced ones.

April’s New Capabilities

Then in April, we released our New Reporting Engine and New Reports. We redesigned our reports (plus added some new ones) to focus on strong visuals, new charting, increased data delivery and more features to customize your views. Watch this guided tour in our April Webinar recording to see them in action.

What’s coming next?

Here are a few preview highlights of what’s on-deck:

• Update mobile menus look and feel
• Deep linking for Facebook reviews – launch the Facebook app on your customer’s mobile device automatically if they have it installed.
• Testimonial tagging – show subsets of your testimonials on different pages of your website. Location pages, product pages, pages for staff members – lots of possibilities.
• New email and landing page designs – dope. You will like these 😉
• Zapier triggers to enable new integrations. For example, what if you could create a support ticket in ZenDesk or HelpScout whenever you received feedback below a certain rating?
• Easy feedback mode selection – We’re making it super easy to select the feedback mode you want – do you want to focus on NPS Score or Online Reviews or Feedback? Now it’s as simple as clicking a button to change modes.

So I hope you can see we take your ideas and feedback seriously, and love improving capabilities in GetFiveStars every month. Did we miss your favorite feature or idea? Please let us know either in the comments below.

Attend Our Monthly Webinars To Catch It All

A great way to stay on top of these changes and learn more every month on customer feedback is by joining our webinars.  Register for our monthly webinar now.  In addition to signing up for the next one we have past webinars listed on the page as well as our YouTube Channel, which you should subscribe to.

In addition to the items listed below, we’ve put a lot of time into a couple of big feature changes and enhancements to the platform.  It’s getting harder to contain our excitement on these; you will see some great new reporting options and the introduction of SMS / Text feedback requests very soon.

In the meantime, here are some of the changes that have rolled live recently:

1- Line break on words, rather than characters in customer list.
In the Customer List, we weren’t formatting the feedback text as well as we could, and some of the line-breaks weren’t right. We’ve cleaned that up, and other formatting too. The result is more information in the Customer List that is easier to scan and read.

Better formatting for the feedback and testimonials in the customers list

2- Feedback response is from logged in user rather than account owner.
Previously, when you responded to customer feedback publicly or privately, the response always came from the business owner. Many of you asked for that to come from the user you are logged in as. So we made that change. (You can also just check a box to make it still come from the owner, which is useful for agencies who are responding on behalf of the business.)

3- Add created date to Avvo reviews.
Previously, Avvo did not return the review date in their API results. Now they’ve added it, and we are showing the date in the Online Review reports (something that many of you requested!)

4- Hide address and phone number on feedback page.
For those of you with service area businesses, you can choose to not show the phone number and address on the feedback page now.

5- Allow white-label account owner to edit their “help” section.
If you are white-labeling and reselling GetFiveStars, you can now customize your help section.

6- Copy/Paste feedback text in the feedback page and follow-up email.
This feature existed before December, but many people didn’t know about it because we didn’t communicate it very effectively. Here’s a video showing how it works.

7- Added seven more sites that you can ask for reviews from.
The list of over 100 sites you can ask for reviews on now includes Bankrate, MyBuilder.com, CanadaStays, Agingcare, GoodReads, Highya and Cratejoy.

8. Revised In-app Messages
Within the app we will be delivering more notices to help keep you in the loop on new features, edits, changes and other details.  Be on the look out for them.

Example of an in-app message notification

Monthly Webinars To Catch It All

A great way to stay on top of these changes and learn more every month on customer feedback is by joining our webinars.  Register for our monthly webinar now.  In addition to signing up for the next one we have past webinars listed on the page as well as our YouTube account, which you should subscribe to.

Let’s look at some of the new features we’ve added to the playbook over the past several weeks.

Expanded Online Review Monitoring To 7 Sites

Touchdown! We have expanded the number of review sites that we can monitor, report on, and send you alerts on when you get new online reviews to 7. We have always offered review monitoring for Google and Facebook; the new additions allow you to monitor YP.com, TripAdvisor, Avvo and Zillow.

Learn more on the new review site additions to monitoring or watch the video below:

Copy / Paste Feedback Comments To Reviews Process

Here’s a capability that many of you have been asking for – allowing your customers to copy the feedback they just left and paste it directly to online review sites like Google, Facebook and others.  The goal of this feature is to make writing a review even easier for consumers.

Pro-tip: You can also now add a tag to your positive-feedback thank-you email that includes your customer’s feedback right in the email for them. This will make it easier for them to copy and paste that before the click on one of the online review links in the email. You can find this tag in the Positive Feedback Email template, and place it anywhere you like within your email.

Example of adding your customer’s feedback to the follow-up email.

Quick Scan Of Your Email Follow-up Sequence & Timing

Now you can quickly scan your email templates in the Email Settings screen to see which follow-up emails you have turned on or off, and what delay timers you have set, at-a-glance.

Based on feedback from several of you, we also added the ability to delay your positive feedback thank-you emails. You identified several scenarios where the thank-you email should not go out right away, so now we let you control the timing of that.

Screenshot of the Email Settings screen with timer settings shown at-a-glance

Just click the plus sign next the these settings to open up the visual email template editor.

Repeat Feedback Controls

Several months ago, we added the ability to get repeat feedback from your customers. This supported many interesting new scenarios for ongoing customer relationships. Some of you asked for more granular control over this ability. You can now turn it on or off depending on the situation for your business locations.

Repeat customer feedback settings

Bug Fix

We fixed a few bugs too. I want to tell you about one of them because it was my “pet peeve” (and maybe some of yours too).

When you are in the customer dashboard, or some screen deeper, and you leave your computer or mobile device for about 30 minutes and come back to it, it would drop you back to the business dashboard again. This drove me crazy because I spend a lot of time in the platform. Well we finally found this bug as squashed it!

Nothing serious, but it was a usability issue that I’m glad to see fixed now.  It’s like we got rid of a delay of game penalty.  🙂

Join Us On Our Monthly Customer Webinars

Close to monthly, we publish these “release notes” to share the new features and capabilities we’ve released with you. We also cover these in our monthly webinars, where we show demos and answer questions about them.  Sign up for the next webinar.

We hope you like these new features and it helps you add more points to your customer experience scoreboard!

Repeat Customer Feedback

Many of you have businesses where you interact with your customers frequently, and want to be able to capture feedback from the same customer over time. The ability to capture more than one feedback per customer is important to many of you, so we’ve added it.

Second Email Follow-up

I know many of you have been waiting patiently for this one – we were almost done with this feature and then ended up revising a whole section of it to make it more streamlined and make the settings screen cleaner. I’m sorry it took longer than we wanted, but I think you’ll be happy with how it turned out!

By default, if you send out a feedback request to a customer and they don’t respond, GetFiveStars will send a reminder email out 3 days later (you can adjust this, or turn it off).

Our research shows that if you follow up with customers who don’t respond with one more reminder a week or two later, you will get many more responses. It seems three is the magic number. This new feature adds a “Second Reminder” that allows you to turn on a new follow-up email to remind customers who have not responded yet.

Note:  The Second Reminder Email is turned “off” in your account by default, so you will need to go and turn in “on” and adjust the days setting to start using it.

You may have noticed in the screen shot above that the settings screens look a little different. We did an overhaul of the settings screens to make them much more “presentable”. We aligned the text and checkboxes, and all the elements on the screen, and added collapsible sections in all of the settings screens to make things more tidy. We hope you like it!

“Replied” Tag

With the Public and Private response to feedback capability we launched a few months ago, many of you asked for a quick and easy way to identify which customers you have already responded to. In addition to the Filters in the Customer Dashboard, we’ve added a “Replied” tag to every customer that you have already replied to.

Email Opened Logged in Activity Log

We’ve added the ability to see if your customer has opened the feedback request email now. You can see it in the “Activity Log” section of the Customer Profile.

Back To The Lab

Ok, that’s it for this month’s release notes. Thanks again for all of your excellent feedback and suggestions. We love nothing more than to hear your ideas and make GetFiveStars a little better for you each month.  We have more features in the works so stay tuned.

Join Us On Our Monthly Customer Webinars

Each month, we publish “release notes” to share the new features and capabilities we’ve released in GetFiveStars. We also cover these in our monthly webinars, where we show demos and answer questions about them.  Join our next webinar to see a deeper walk through if these new features and to ask questions about them.