How are you managing your reputation?

Any business owner will tell you that online customer reviews can be the wind in your sails or the thorn in your side. Online reviews have a wider reach than a word of mouth recommendation, and for whatever reason, people are more inclined to complain loudly when they’re upset than praise loudly when they’ve been served well. SocialSurvey aims to shift the playing field.

The company came up with a simple automated process to balance the good reviews with the bad: create an easy way to ask the customers for feedback, ask them if it’s okay to share it on social media, and ask if they’ll write more reviews on other platforms.

“You can’t improve where you can’t measure. You can get in a room and say, ‘we should make our customers happier,’ but how can you possibly know how to do that if you don’t know how happy they are today with the process you’ve already built?” said Craig Pollack, SocialSurvey’s SVP of Business Development.

How it works: Once a loan is closed, the clients are sent a survey, the questions on which are set by the administrator at the mortgage company. Good reviews, ones with high scores, are automatically posted to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Unhappy reviews are not published on social media, but they are a fully visible part of an individual loan officer’s profile, and company management is alerted.

“The loan officer may have been doing a terrible job of communicating, may have mislead the borrower, but somehow managed to squeak this customer through the system and get them closed. Senior management may have no idea this loan officer was lying, deceiving, didn’t make follow up calls, didn’t educate the borrower, all of those things, and now the review goes out, the loan officer’s getting notified that the survey was negative, but senior management also gets notified. And so bad loan officers can’t hide anymore.”

Pollack calls SocialSurvey an “enterprise tool,” allowing mortgage companies to either train or remove originators who aren’t producing to a quality standard in a way that is enhancing the brand reputation. Clients must use SocialSurvey for all of their originators, not only in a particular region or those that close a certain volume.

Reviews are often the first place a consumer goes to check out any type of service, but don’t call SocialSurvey the Yelp of the mortgage industry. Although both companies deal in reviews, that’s where the similarities end.

“I like [the comparison] in the sense that they’re a large, well-known company, that’s awesome that we’re dominant in that sense, but there are a lot of differences,” Pollack said. “Yelp specifically tells restaurants you’re not allowed to ask customers for reviews, and they can get penalized if they do. We are the opposite. We’re attaching ourselves to a loan origination system and we’re automatically surveying 100% of customers on their behalf. We don’t discourage it, we encourage it, and in fact, we insist that a lender using SocialSurvey connects to their LOS.”

In May, SocialSurvey sent out surveys to several thousand users of their system who had a Facebook connection and at least 20 reviews.

“Those people told us that on average, having SocialSurvey, having reviews and testimonials on their website, on their Facebook, and elsewhere, improved their business by 13%,” Pollack said. Apart from improving business, it’s also an easy, shareable way for originators to show referral partners their results without either talking themselves up or making promises. It’s as simple as sending a link to their personal SocialSurvey page.

SocialSurvey has other tools for businesses, one being Employee WellCheck , which takes the survey idea and applies it to a company’s employees instead of its customers. Employees are asked about their experience working at the company, and the employees who give the company the highest ratings are encouraged to write reviews on Glassdoor and Indeed. SocialSurvey is giving away Employee WellCheck free to customers until the end of the year, and they will also provide an analysis of the results.

Another feature that’s free to SocialSurvey customers through the end of 2018 is SocialMonitor, which monitors the social media activity of employees to ensure compliant social posts and marketing content.

To get the most value out of SocialSurvey, originators have to log in and connect their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn pages, and the permissions that SocialSurvey has in order to post the originator’s positive reviews also gives permission to read everything else that they post. So when a loan officer posts social media content with any terms that might be questionable for their particular enterprise, it gets flagged and then a communication begins between the original poster and the person who’s responsible for reviewing the content and making sure that it’s in compliance with the company’s social media policy.

“The admins who are monitoring, who have the compliance responsibility, are going to really like the fact that there’s tons and tons of data, really simple workflows that’s kind of like an email inbox, except that we’re flagging certain emails and social posts and we’re saying pay attention to these first” Pollack said. “It’s a phenomenal product,”

Still unsure about the value of SocialSurvey? Check out SocialSurvey’s own page. The reviews speak for themselves.

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