Word of Mouth is a fantastic way to show your potential customers the great service you provide and gives them a reason to choose you!
By being a part of our Happy Customers Program we will help you to get more reviews, to improve your ranking on search engines and in turn, get more customers!
For more information about how we can help you to grow your business, please click here. Alternatively, please feel free to call us on 1300 496 669 and a member of our Business Solutions team can discuss how we can help your business and of course answer any questions you may have.
No, and again, never.
Basically any business that provides (or should provide) an element of service. A full listing of the types of businesses currently listed on Word of Mouth can be seen here, but users are always adding new categories. Users can review any Australian business on Word of Mouth.
Word of Mouth can help you to promote your business and build a fantastic online reputation. We can provide you with tools to help you get reviews, and of course, work with you to ensure your business is using your great feedback to get more customers.
For more information about how we can help you to grow your business, please click here. Alternatively, please feel free to call us on 1300 496 669 and a member of our Business Solutions team can discuss how we can help your business and of course answer any questions you may have.
Businesses are almost always added to Word of Mouth when they are first reviewed by a customer. We’re all about quality, not quantity and we want to hear what actual customers think of businesses. There’s enough advertising guff in other places.
Businesses that are serious about customer satisfaction are invited to participate in our Happy Customers Program. This program helps businesses keep their finger on the pulse and ensure their business continues to meet their customers’ expectations—as well as ramping up their word-of-mouth marketing.
When Word of Mouth users see the “Happy Customers” program icon, they can be sure that they are dealing with a business that makes customer service their first priority and goes out of their way to provide a fantastic customer experience. These are also the businesses that actively encourage an open dialogue on their business.
As part of the Happy Customers Program, we also provide a Problem Resolution Process. Despite the best of intentions, even great businesses experience problems from time to time. Misunderstandings happen, things go wrong, and yes, people do make mistakes. We understand that this is a fact of life. What’s important though is that when things do go wrong, they get fixed. With the Problem Resolution Process, if a customer submits a unfavourable rating (less than 3 out of 5) on a business, we help resolve the issue by giving the customer the option of either: allowing Word of Mouth to pass their contact details onto the business so that the business can get in touch and attempt to resolve the issue; liaising with the business anonymously through Word of Mouth to resolve the issue; or in cases where the customer feels they have pursued all angles with the business, they can of course just post their review as it is. Businesses that participate in the Happy Customers Program are also provided with various promotional materials to help communicate to their customers that they are a business that is serious about customer service.
If you are a business and are interested in joining our Happy Customers Program, check out this page for more information. Alternatively, feel free to call us on 1300 496 669 and a member of our Business Solutions team can discuss how we can help your business and of course any questions you may have.
No, you are not able to review your own business. Reviews can only be submitted by paying customers of the business. However, as a Business owner you can add information about your business by joining the Happy Customers program and you can also comment on reviews to clarify something a customer has said and demonstrate your commitment to customer service.
Nope, never.
Depending on the type of search you are doing, businesses are sorted by “Highest Rating”, “Most Reviews”, “Shortest Distance”, “Business Name”, “Most Recent”, or “Best Match”. You can change how you want them sorted from the panel on the left-hand side.
When we sort by “Highest Rating”, we look at the average overall rating, the number of reviews each business has, and whether or not the business is in Word of Mouth’s Happy Customers Program (ie proactive about customer service).
When we sort by “Best Match” we look at the best match for the key words you enter. These might be contained in the business name, categories the business is in, or reviews for that business.
There are basically three key aspects of Word of Mouth that help keep the reviews as dependable as possible.
You can change your Word of Mouth Name, and any other registration or profile information, by going to Manage Account section here. You can change this to anything but it needs to be unique. Any changes you make will filter through to the past reviews you’ve posted.
The integrity of the reviews on Word of Mouth is of utmost importance. One way we can tell that each reviewer is a real, unique person is by asking you to verify your email address, but verifying your mobile phone number provides us with added confidence. Plus, if one of your reviews is ever queried, we need to be able to get in touch with you, and a mobile phone number is usually the fastest way to do this.
It’s not essential that you provide your mobile phone number though—although it does help to increase your TrustFactor.
However, to be eligible for most promotions we run, we will require you to have a verified mobile phone number. As you can appreciate, when we provide incentives for people to enter reviews, it’s extremely important that we can validate those reviews by being able to contact each reviewer whenever necessary. The easiest way for us to do this is generally by verifying a mobile phone number.
Please note that Word of Mouth does not use mobile phone numbers for any marketing purposes and will not give your number to anyone.
Word of Mouth is a user-generated directory where people share the experiences they have with businesses—both good and bad! Every day, Word of Mouth helps thousands of people find awesome businesses (and avoid the dodgy operators). By reviewing the businesses you’ve transacted with, you can help other consumers get better service, help businesses be recognised for providing great service, and also provide constructive feedback to businesses you’ve had a negative experience with.
You can change your Word of Mouth Name, and any other registration or profile information, by going to Manage Account section here. You can change this to anything but it needs to be unique. Any changes you make will filter through to the past reviews you’ve posted.
To follow a friend or someone you just think is a great contributor, you just need to click on their display name on any review. This will take you to their member page. On the left hand side (below their display name and display image) there is link that states “follow me”. By clicking this link, they will be automatically added to your “friends” list.
To unfollow any other Word of Mouth member, you need to go into the “My Profile” section on the home page. On the left hand side you will see a link for Friends/Following. Click on this link and you will see a list of anyone you are currently following. From here, you can choose to unfollow them if you wish.
When you review a business that we have not yet classified as a small Australian business, your points will show up as "Pending"—this will usually be resolved within 1–3 business days.
Sometimes you might enter a review and find that it doesn’t immediately show on the
Word of Mouth website. This might be because something about the review has
triggered it to be flagged for us to manually check. We check all of these cases within
1 business day, and if we find a problem with the review, we’ll email you to let you
know what the problem is. The other reason your review may not show is if it’s a
negative review and your TrustFactor is not high enough. Once you increase your
TrustFactor to 70 or more (which is easy to do by verifying your email, verifying your
mobile and/or entering a couple more reviews) your review will automatically be displayed.
Member’s reviews are retracted in situations where:
Word of Mouth investigates reviews whenever another member flags a
review as suspect or inappropriate, or our own checking finds something to be suspicious
about the review or member.
No. Here at Word of Mouth we encourage you to share a review about your experience whether it was a positive or a negative experience. With any review you must ensure that it adheres to our Fair Play Policy and most of all, it must be an accurate and detailed account of your experience. Please ensure that there is no offensive language used and no negative personal comments directly at an employee. Your review should be descriptive and informative and relate to the business itself, not any individuals.
As long as the reviews you enter are an honest descriptions of your experience and you stick to our Fair Play Policy and Conditions of Use, you should feel free to post whatever you want, whether positive or negative.
Simple—just go to Review a Business (which can be found along the top of each page), and follow the prompts. First you’ll enter a small amount of information and we’ll use this to check whether that business has already been entered. If not, then you get to enter as much, or as little, information about that business as you like. Then you do the actual review, telling other Word of Mouth users what you loved or didn’t love about that business.
You can edit any of your published reviews by going to the “My Profile” section of your account, and clicking on the “edit” button underneath the relevant review.
If you’d like to edit the actual business details rather than the review itself, you’ll see that on the business listing. There’s a link that says “Is this information incorrect?”—just click on this and let us know what needs to be changed.
The Word of Mouth TrustFactor allows you to better gauge the reputation and reliability of other Word of Mouth members. In real life you don’t necessarily trust everyone you know to the same extent, and Word of Mouth members are all different too.
Each member is assigned a TrustFactor score—this is based on a number of dimensions and is recalculated every night. TrustFactor scores range from 0 (extremely bad) to 100 (extremely good) and reviews from members with high TrustFactors are given more importance than reviews from others.
It’s not hard to build a high TrustFactor—just enter some key contact information (so that we can easily communicate with you if we need to verify anything), do your bit to contribute reviews, and ensure everything you post is an honest and fair account of your experience.
Members’ TrustFactorTM scores are calculated as follows:
| Identity Verification—adds to members’ TrustFactor scores | |
|---|---|
| Verification Type | Points |
| Email Verification | 50 points |
| Mobile Verification | 20 points |
| Facebook Verification/Connection | 20 points |
| Community Contribution—adds to members’ TrustFactorTM scores | |
|---|---|
| Number of Reviews | Points |
| 1–3 Reviews | 10 points |
| 4–10 Reviews | 20 points |
| 11–20 Reviews | 30 points |
| 21–30 Reviews | 40 points |
| >30 Reviews | 50 points |
| Doubtful Behaviour—subtracts from members’ TrustFactorTM scores | |
|---|---|
| Retracted Reviews | Minus 10 points for every retracted review |
Members’ reviews are retracted in situations where:
Word of Mouth investigates reviews whenever another member flags a review as suspect or inappropriate, or our own checking finds something to be suspicious about the review or member.
The integrity of our reviews is our number one priority. Our Fair Play Policy is designed to ensure that Word of Mouth reviews are legitimate and accurately describe people’s experiences and opinions. You can read the Policy here.
By default, we include the businesses that service the area that you are searching for. For example, a plumber might travel to your area or an online store might deliver to your area. If you prefer, you can turn this off by ticking the box on the left hand side that says "Display local businesses only". Here you can also choose the distance from the area you wish to search as well.
Reviews are submitted by everyday people like you. To post a review, you just need to be a customer of the business. If you’ve had a good experience, it’s a great help for that business to review them on Word of Mouth as lots of other people will see your review. Likewise, if you’ve had a negative experience, it’s a good way to let other people know about this—and hopefully encourage the business to lift their game! It’s just like the old over-the-fence / email / coffee-break chat that you’d have with people to share your experience with businesses—but on the web.
There’s a place for professional reviewers but personally, we think that all that free drink and wine clouds their judgment and we’d rather hear what the normal people think.
That’s up to you. By default, your “Word of Mouth Name” and TrustFactor will show against your reviews and users can click through to your My Profile page and see your suburb and other reviews you’ve done, as well as any other information you’ve included in your profile. You can choose your own Word of Mouth Name—making it as identifying (by making it your real name), or as anonymous as you’d like (use DrWho, MickeyMouse, or a name that only your friends would know). If you want to remain anonymous for a particular review, you can choose to “Post Anonymously” when you enter the review. We understand that sometimes you might want to use this—perhaps for your hair replacement specialist or gynaecologist (especially if your descriptions are graphic). But in general, if your review is true and fair, what’s to hide?
Rarely. But if the review looks suspicious for some reason, if it is flagged by another Word of Mouth user as being suspicious, or if the business owner (or representative) contacts us and alleges that the review is false or inaccurate, we will investigate. If we cannot contact the member within a reasonable time, or if their contact details are incorrect, we will retract the review. If we can contact the reviewer, we will mediate and determine whether the review is fair, given the member’s experience. In these cases, the review may be modified (sometimes toned down), or retracted. We will also remove or edit any review that contains inappropriate or offensive content, or that breaches our Fair Play Policy. The idea is to keep the reviews on Word of Mouth as dependable as possible. If we have to sacrifice a few, then so be it.
The purpose of Word of Mouth is not to make squillions of dollars, but to provide a really useful resource that evens out the playing field for businesses, and gives more power to consumers.
We cover our costs with our Happy Customers Program. This is a way that businesses that provide good service can boost their word-of-mouth marketing and add things like special offers, images, and a description of the services to their listing. This program is designed for small businesses so the fees are minimal.