AirSafe Register
BCAS members - make the most of your Airsafe register
The AirSafe register is one of many membership benefits offered by BCAS, helping you to collect customer reviews and setting you apart from your competitors. It’s free, so don’t miss out. Read more about AirSafe here
Why should I bother with reviews?
Whatever the goals of your business, new customers are vital to your long term future. Research consistently shows that, when choosing a new business, we don’t trust advertising very much at all and that online reviews are the most trusted source of information after recommendations from people we know:
Why are the reviews collected by Referenceline?
It’s all about trust. Before your potential customers can trust the reviews they read, they need to know that they can trust the source of the reviews. Only 15% of people trust reviews provided by a business itself, whereas almost 80% of people would trust reviews provided by a consumer organisation such as Trading Standards or Referenceline. [Source: Rightmove study into how consumers choose a removal company]. Referenceline has been working with Trading Standards, the Office of Fair Trading and others for almost 20 years and has one of the longest track records of any review site.
How do I get listed?
Every BCAS member is automatically listed by Referenceline. To see all the most recent reviews, go directly to www.referenceline.com/bcas or select “Compressed Air” on Referenceline’s home page. You can search for your business by name or location:
How do I get access to Referenceline?
To register with the site for the first time, click “Register/Password Reminder” in the top right-hand corner of the page and follow the instructions. You will receive an email with a random password which you can change to something more easily remembered. If you ever forget your password, simply use the same link again to receive a reminder.
What is my Control Panel?
Once you have logged in to Referenceline, you will see a new set of links on the left-hand side of your pages. We call this your Control Panel. This contains everything you need to edit your listing, invite your customers to leave reviews, add links to your website and so on.
How do I edit my listing?
Your listing will show the contact details you have previously given to BCAS. If you need to edit these, then simply log in to your Control Panel, select “Contact Details” and make the necessary changes. Don’t forget to let BCAS know about any changes that should appear on the BCAS website.
How do handwritten reviews work?
You will see that many of the reviews are handwritten. When you are first listed, Referenceline will send you a pack of freepost review forms to hand to your customers. You can order more, free of charge, at any time just by emailing mark@referenceline.com. The forms are already printed with your business name and address, so you simply hand them to your customers and they post them directly to Referenceline’s freepost address.
How can I encourage my customers to leave reviews online?
Instead of waiting for your customers to visit the website, you can send them an email instead. Choose “invite feedback” in your Control Panel then:
- enter your customer’s email address
- add a personal message and save it to reuse in future
- press submit
Your customer will receive an email from Referenceline with your message and a simple link to the review form.
How do I collect reviews from several customers at the same time?
We make it easy to collect reviews from a large number of customers. Click on “invite feedback” and then “send emails to several customers at the same time” at the top of the page. You can upload a file of email addresses and names, and Referenceline will contact them all with individual emails.
How can my customers ask to leave a review?
Any customer can leave a review by using the “Your Feedback” link on your individual pages. Referenceline will send you an email with the customer’s details and you respond by clicking on the link in that email.
How do I know that reviews are from my genuine customers?
Many businesses have suffered from fake reviews on websites, often submitted by competitors. Referenceline’s system prevents this because you approve every request to leave a review, as explained above. So you can be sure that every review is from a genuine customer.
Can I stop customers from leaving a review by ignoring their requests?
No. If a genuine customer is prevented from leaving a review by the BCAS member, then Referenceline will send the customer the necessary email to leave their feedback and will also contact BCAS to advise them of this. This will be treated as a very serious breach of BCAS code of conduct.
Should I worry about negative reviews?
You can’t please everyone all of the time and you should expect the occasional “grumble”. This may sometimes be the first opportunity to find out that something is wrong, in which case the information is priceless and a great opportunity to put things right before it goes any further. Your overall rating may therefore slip as a result, but most people looking at the site will be more reassured by the fact that complaints really do get published than troubled by any one bad review.
How can I respond to negative reviews?
You can respond to any review – not just the ones that are negative. When you log in to the website, you will see a space below each review for your response. We suggest that you keep it short and, of course, polite. Try to deal with the facts rather than any “mudslinging” and please don’t give the person’s full name. Every response is moderated by Referenceline, so there will be a small delay before publication.
When are reviews published?
Reviews received by post are published in the evening of the day on which they are received, and the text of the handwritten comments is usually entered on the next working day. Reviews received online are published as soon as they have been moderated, usually within a few hours on a working day. Reviews with low ratings (See below) are held for up to 5 days, but may be held for longer if the customer agrees or the complaint is being investigated by BCAS.
What about reviews with low ratings?
As noted above, we hold any review with a low rating for up to 5 working days. A low rating means any one satisfaction rating of 3 or less, or a form which is marked as Not Recommended. This gives you the opportunity to contact the customer to see if something can be done about the issue, so you can be sure that you won’t be taken by surprise by a negative review which may already start to affect your reputation before you have a chance to do something about it. We will publish the review at the end of the 5 days, unless you want to have the review handled as a formal complaint – in which case we will advise BCAS and the customer accordingly.
What about complaints?
Complaints can be escalated to BCAS, in which case they will remain unpublished for as long as advised by BCAS. Once the issue has been finally closed, the review will be published with any comment from BCAS as appropriate.
What can I do if I feel a complaint is “unfair”?
Review sites can sometimes be used by genuine customers in a way which may seem unfair to the business. For example, you may feel that the complaint is simply wrong, or exaggerated and that the customer’s motive has more to do with trying to negotiate a discount or some other unfair advantage. Referenceline does not publish customers’ details and so a negative review can have a huge impact on the business with virtually no repercussion on the customer. In these situations, you may use our Independent Dispute Resolution service, see below.
Independent Dispute Resolution
If BCAS agree with your view that a negative review might be considered unfair, then you have the right to escalate the complaint to Referenceline’s Independent Dispute Resolution service, currently operated by Ombudsman Services. If they agree with your view, then there will be no charge for this. If they agree with the customer, then there may be a fee of between £100 and £500 depending on the complexity of the case.
Publication of unfair complaints
If a review is deemed unfair by the Independent dispute resolution process, then:
- Referenceline will publish a summary of the Ombudsman’s opinion
- The ratings will be excluded from the overall total for that business
- The text of the review may be moderated in accordance with the Ombudsman’s findings.