Spring is Coming – Along with many improvements

Here at Testimonial Robot, we have constantly tried to add value and reduce feature creeping that would hamper the overall customer experience. Our tool is meant to be simple and easy to use because we want every kind of person to be able to use it for their customer reviews collection management.

We want Techies and Non-techies to be able to achieve the same results with our customizing features.

Some of the planned additions for the Spring are listed below:

  • Style builder
  • Custom Star images
  • Easier collection of reviewer photos
  • More social media and growth features :)

We want to make Testimonial Robot one of the best growth tools for SMEs that want to help to increase their sales.

Remember ‘Honest’ reviews sell and bring more to the Well!

All the best for now,

Customer Review Widget

The Best Testimonial Reviews Widget for your website

 

 

 

Spring is Coming – Along with many improvements

Rich Snippets for Products / SEO

Where can I show Rich Snippets for my products?

Rich snippets will work on all pages except the Home page!

But if you have a product or service page and have some reviews then Rich Snippets is a great selling tool when combined with review ratings to show in your SERP result pages.

 

How OUR rich snippets show in SERP result pages…

trobotserpratings

Above you can see the results of our widget in creating the Rich snippet data in real time with the latest indexed copy of your page as stored by Google.

How the process works:

  1. Add our snippet to your product page
  2. Collect reviews with ratings from you customers or ask them to populate the Testimonial Robot widget form
  3. Use the Google Add Url to re-index your page or wait for Google to auto re-index
  4. Test that all is working as should be using site:www.yourdomain.com in Google

That’s it! But remember to allow Google time to re-index properly. It can take a week or two in some instances.

Now as new customers add new reviews for you, your SERP rating score and votes will increase automatically without having to update your web pages individually.

Super, isn’t it? Plus you don’t need to update your pages each time you have a new batch of reviews :)

Would you like snippets and our review collection widget for your website? Then check out our trial below.

Free 14 day trial

Customer Review Widget

Rich Snippets for Products / SEO

Experience at SaaStock 2016

Filling the Gap

I never had the chance to attend the Dublin Websummit as the value seemed too low and the event very diluted and broad. The sheer scale of the Summit made it look like you would be attending a crowded concert or football game and a bit overwhelming.

Also, the pricing of the web summit amazed me too, wow!!

Websummit was too expensive
“Startups & Bootstrappers, we don’t want you! we want businesses with tons of cash!!”

 

Out of the crater left in Dublin post-websummit there was a new convention coming and this one looked worthwhile, valuable and relevant to my SaaS business. That event was to be SaaStock and was brainchild of Alex Theuma of the SaaScribe blog.

It looked to be very interesting and great value for money, as it targeted my core area of interest, so I decided to give it a shot!

SaaS City Talks

I attended the SaaS City Bootcamp and was second to arrive at the venue, I wasn’t sure I was at the right place as their was no sign on the door. But after a short while things got going and more attendees arrived for the networking session. The talk itself was fully booked out weeks in advance. Many of the Saastock attendees were wait-listed for access to it.

Once the talks started I was delighted. I had not been to many talks on SaaS or the SaaS Sales side of SaaS business so this was a pleasant surprise.

Fergus Gloster’s talk was entertaining and very informative, as it contained tons of great actionable content from his time at many companies, including SalesForce. I felt I had missed a trick and should have been taking notes. But it turns out we would be given the slides later.

Next talk from #Slack was great too! Wow, what a success story! I would loved to been a fly on the wall when they launched the first version of #slack that obtained 8,000 customers in 24 hours! Phenomenal momentum!

We then broke for tea and scones, how Irish :)

Patrick from PriceIntelligently was next and his talk was also entertaining and opened my eyes on my pricing. I intend to follow his advice. And thanks for the great T-Shirts Guys!

Dave Blake from ClientSuccess was next and was such a nice guy! And their business is a great success story too. Their Customer Success SaaS product looks very polished and professional and they are committed to all things Customer Success related.

Some of the guys then took to the streets for a Pub Crawl and then the Welcome Party in the Powerscourt House. I had business to do so I couldn’t attend and being my home town I was less likely not to have other commitments.

SAASTOCK – the Main event

Early start again and I was Darted to the RDS location just in time to make Des Traynor’s talk. It was like a timeline of the Internet and software evolution, but it was very entertaining.

Through out the day there were many great talks and I can’t write about them all as I should because I had not intended to write a blog on it, until today.

There were two stages and at most times each stage area was full and had many other viewers standing and listening to the talks.

For fund seekers there was a great Investor Zone area with many big names like Scale Venture PartnersPointNine, 500 Startups to name but a few. We could see the pitches and deals been discussed, perhaps some up and coming SaaS businesses were partnered up with some big venture funds on the day. There was definitely a hive of activity in there.

The lunch was great. I had expected standard fare, but was pleasantly surprised at the effort the SaaStock team put in. There was Fish Shack, Bagel Factory, Eddie Rockets, and many more.

The weather was nice enough to really enjoy the outdoor marquee where lunch was held. We were accompanied by atmospheric Acid House Music provided by local Dublin DJ Alex Donald. I had the Fish and Chips from Fish Shack which was very nice indeed!

I attended the rest of the talks and meetings with great fellow entrepreneurs and had the obligatory Guinness for the networking session at the end of the day.

Most of the attendees were heading on to the Odeon for the After party that evening. Unfortunately, I was not staying in town as I need to head out to meet my partner for dinner and a show elsewhere but I am sure it was a great night!

Overall Impression of Saastock 2016

I met many  great people at their respective business stands and was super excited to try to get the Chartmogul app for Testimonial Robot.

I had a lot of interest from potential users for Testimonial Robot that want to use our White Label offering to collect feedback from their customers.

We are in talks with a business that may want to create multiple accounts with us. So we have a lot to show for attending the event, new contacts, some to many signups, great success stories and a great learning experience on the recent developments with the SaaS community.

A well organised and valuable event that I am glad to have attended. Congrats to Alex and his team for putting on a great event!

Customer Review Widget

Experience at SaaStock 2016

Future Updates for Testimonial Robot

We are planning to add many new features and to improve some existing ones.

Over the next few months new features will be added based on the priority that we have assigned to them. Some such changes will include a snippet that works better for listing reviews on multiple product shopping pages.

Combining the current features in a more user-friendly manner within the snippet code.

Adding more customising features such as a snippet builder to allow users to customise the look on the snippet before pasting the final code to their page.

Customer Review Widget

Future Updates for Testimonial Robot

Testing Your Website for Rich Snippet Ratings

If you are using our review widget on your website in ‘ratings mode’ and want to test that the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ratings are working, here are the steps to follow.

First off, make sure your website page is fast enough and not suffering from slow download times etc. As this could impact on whether Google Rich Snippets will show or not. Something like a 10 second page load time might be an issue.

Google’s indexing is looking to jump-in and jump-out of pages at top speed so having at least an average loading page time is crucial to ensure that Google get to index the snippet code.

Next, make sure you do not have a conflicting Rich Snippet code present on the page already, that is a big no-no and will cause neither one to work.

Once that is done we do not test with the Structured Data Tool as this does not work the same as the real-life indexing that Google does.

Add your page back into Google index manually if you wish via the webmasters tool:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?pli=1

or

Just allow a week or few days to go by until Google re-indexes your page anyway.

After you are sure it’s been re-indexed then check using Google:

site:www.yourdomain.com

This will show your pages for your site, along with the Google SERP rating.

trobotserpratings

 

Customer Review Widget

Testing Your Website for Rich Snippet Ratings

A Tweak A Day Keeps The Queries Away

Some issues just get ignored or fall down the list depending on the priorities you set for your working week.

Getting the basics fixed and working becomes a necessity when users start to complain about an issue you once believed, “no one will notice or care” about.

Constant tweaking on those smaller less critical (but still annoying) UX / UI bugs will help to reduce the overall queries and will help with retention for those customers not willing to complain but who just jump ship anyway.

So try to make a list of the lesser smaller issues and call it your Tweak List. Then tackle one or more of the tweaks each day.

I actually immediately added a new issue spotted by a customer to the Tweak List and went at it right away. Then solved the issue in less than 1 hour. The customer was amazed and gave high praise and is now a avid promoter of our service.

Nice if you can get it!

Customer Review Widget

 

A Tweak A Day Keeps The Queries Away

How existing customers can help you grow

So, it was 8am this morning I got a ticket support email from a customer that we had promised to deliver a feature for.  Not good!

I realized that  I should have knuckled down and got the job done within a few days but being over 1 week later the feature was already travelling further and further down our priority list.

The feature wasn’t as crucial as others but I noticed that the customer pressure I had on my mind, and the thought of possibly upsetting a current customer or possibly even losing that customer led me to focus much more and get it completed in much shorter time.

I was more Agile and I got a buzz from the anticipated kudos I would get from the customer loving their newly added feature. Added just for them! Don’t misunderstand me, the feature was of benefit to all our customers, but to that customer it was theirs.

This has real benefits for me too. I got the job-done satisfaction of creating a new feature (adding value) to our service and therefore adding value to all our customers.

I now have a new eager advocate for our business who is more loyal to our service than before, because they were satisfied, but also more importantly because they contributed.

That contribution or vested interest is super important for generating sustainable growth. So the customer in question then becomes a promoter of your brand or service, who would more readily recommend you to their peer network and beyond.

It’s so simple it’s brilliant. But as developers & entrepreneurs with limited time, we need to be careful of feature creep and be careful of over promising when you can’t deliver.

So what do I propose then?

Let’s say you have a plan for introducing a range of new features and updates to your SaaS service or product. Just send them out on an email to customers and ask them to vote on which ones they would like to see implemented.

Then work through the most important or the most popular ones, but get them all done anyway. The voting process will have an effect of creating the vested interest I spoke of earlier. Like any of the reality voting TV programmes – people will have their favorites and they love to be right! So let them be right!

Later on, thank them for suggesting the feature and tell them when it’s done!

Customer Review Widget

How existing customers can help you grow

New features on the way

If we have not included a crucial feature that you require – please let us know or tweet us at @TestimonialR or contact our support team on the www.testimonialrobot.com

Here are some on the great new features we are hoping to introduce over the next two months.

Exporting Testimonials from Dashboard Screen

Some of our customers want this for peace of mind and for post-review analysis of there customer feedback. We fully understand this. Current export formats are in Excel and Tab delimited text file.

Newly Updated Customer Request Screen

We have noticed that the customer request screen has been ignored of late and with a view to resolving that we are working on version 2 of this screen which will include a logging / tracking system for the requests so you can see what customers are responding to your requests and which ones are failing to react.

Each request will be logged for viewing and re-sending if required. Also delivery tracking and viewing of email by the customer (similar to mailchimp etc.) is on the cards too.

Widget Wizard

We soon hope to have a new user-friendly Widget Builder feature, which will allow users and non-techies the ability to customize the colors and layout of your snippet.

Customer Review Widget Improvements

Customers are loving our Rich Snippet rating compatibility and this is confirmed by the increase in signups we are getting everyday. We want to now improve the visuals of the review Scroller widget and also add a similar dynamic form function to the List Widget.

Snippet tidy-up: We are looking to build more features into the generic snippet code lines so that forms and popups are part of the snippet from the start and can be switched on with only a single setting.

If you have not yet tried our service – please avail of our free 14-Day Trial here

Customer Review Widget

 

 

 

 

 

New features on the way

How to get the Best Reviews from your Customers

So, after listening to Seth Godin on an entrepreneur / growth Podcast (there are so many to name!), I have decided to take his advice to Blog once a day, if possible.

This will allow for more ideas to generate themselves and might attract users to request new features that matter to them and their customers.

So for the first of the daily posts I am going to just touch lightly on how to collect Testimonials or Reviews from your customers.

So without delay, here are some bullet tips:

  • Identify repeat users or users you believe had a good experience
  • Also, identify separately one or two users that did not have a good experience (I’ll explain later)
  • Ask them to be specific – you want a targeted review to highlight what was right or wrong about your service or product
  • Don’t bombard them with text or content – keep the request short and snappy. 1 or 2 paragraphs of text at most. Less is more.
  • Ask them to provide one or two lines only – they can and will offer more if there are delighted with you. But just asking for only 1 or 2 lines is a more inviting prospect for the customer
  • Correct grammar and spelling from your end – do not ask customers to redo their reviews
  • Always reply to received reviews with a courteous pleasant message that does not come across as generic
  •  Never speak for your customer – do not embellish their reviews or testimonials – people have a nose for fake statements

The reason for asking for feedback from those that had issue with your offering is so you can fix the mistakes that are occurring. Poke a Yoke is a term in Quality and Sigma Sigma that is used for reducing errors / mistakes from service or product.  It is also known as Mistake Proofing.

I will add a little feature graphic soon. Thanks for your Time!

Testimonial Robot Team

TR_logo_final_1

 

How to get the Best Reviews from your Customers

Adding Rich Snippets to website

Well for anyone that doesn’t want to manage their Rich Snippet ratings we have some great news!

Our system now shows up in Google search organically with the rating generated by our Widget. So as well doing the Rich Snippet creation part for you our widget will dynamically add any new ratings to Rich Snippet results when Google next indexes your page.

 

rich snippet ratings for google

Check out our FREE 14-day trial over at www.testimonialrobot.com to try our widget.

 

 

Adding Rich Snippets to website