How To Create A Review Engine with Aspect

Pulled directly from YouTube's own transcript for the recording (2026-09-09) and lightly cleaned for reading — filler words and false starts removed, verbal stumbles smoothed, otherwise verbatim. The chapters above mark the recording's own structure.

Today I’m going to show you how to turn reviews into more sales. It might seem like collecting 100 extra reviews each month could make a big difference, but unless you’re using this specific formula, you’re letting that review power go to waste. We call it the review engine. It consists of collecting, analyzing, and converting reviews into future sales. And after you see it, you’ll understand why it’s better than collecting a bunch of short five-star reviews. But to make the point, I’m going to be using Hoffmann Brothers, a local HVAC company here in St. Louis. They have 11,000 reviews on Google with a 4.9 star rating. That seems fantastic, and it is. They are excellent at collecting reviews, but they’re all concentrated on Google Maps. Their Yelp account only has 320 reviews, and it only has 3.5 stars. That means when you Google something like Hoffmann reviews, you get a very different picture than that Google Maps result. So I’ll walk you through how Hoffmann could be better leveraging their reviews using the review engine. And I’m Chris with Aspect by ConsumerAffairs. Over the past 20 years, we’ve helped thousands of companies leverage hundreds of thousands of reviews in order to better shape their reputation online. With that in mind, I’m going to break down how the review engine works: how you can start to collect long-form stories from your customers, analyze those stories to understand what your customers are telling you, and then leverage them in order to convert future customers. Set this up correctly and your reviews will start selling for you.

So first, I like to just take an audit of where your company stands today. In this case, Hoffmann Brothers. You can see they have 4.9 stars on Google and 11,867 reviews. That’s a whole ton of reviews, and their review velocity is amazing — they are really good at capturing customer sentiment. The problem is that it’s really concentrated in Google. But Google reviews, while they’re great for Google Maps, do not power AI Overviews. So if you Google Hoffmann Brothers reviews, none of those some 11,000-plus reviews will ever show up there — at least not right now. Instead of citing any of their reviews from Google, you end up getting a whole bunch of citations from Reddit in the AI Overviews, and Reddit ends up dominating the page. Now, they are collecting reviews elsewhere — you can see they have Yelp and Best Pix Report. My first observation here is they’re putting all of their effort into Google Maps reviews, which is fine, but it could be more efficiently spent across platforms. So we’ll get into that in a bit.

Now, the other problem I’m seeing in their reviews more generally, but also in these sub-5.0’s, is just the fact that they’re not getting depth in the stories. They’re getting a lot of surface-level understanding of what customer problems are, but they’re not getting the great stories — like mine. They replaced my HVAC system two years ago, and then over winter a mouse ate through all of the controls in the system, and it totally messed up the ability for it to heat. The air conditioner for some reason still worked, but the heating wouldn’t. So they tried all winter to fix it, and because it was mice, it didn’t necessarily fit into our warranty. But the service technician I talked to was able to figure out that because only the heat was broken but the AC was working, they had fixed the unit, and something was still wrong with the board itself, and he was able to place it under a warranty claim. So I didn’t have to shell out the extra $5,000 for a new AC unit — he was able to get it under warranty and just charge me the labor for it. Now, that is a fantastic story, but no one’s ever asked me for that level of detail. You might just be like, “Do you like Hoffmann?” And yeah, I like Hoffmann. They saved me a bunch of money in that instance, but they didn’t get all of the details. And that’s where Aspect by ConsumerAffairs can come in and get that out of your customers. You want the full stories.

So how do we help Hoffmann collect these reviews? Well, we think of it in three stages: collect, analyze, and convert. Stage one is collect. In order for you to be successful with Aspect, you need to collect reviews. So you can think of Aspect as your review engine, and you provide the fuel for that engine. On the initial kickoff, we ask for a set of past customers that we can call by phone and email. That’ll get your profile supercharged, because it needs that base content in order to start ranking in Google and for you to have really any understanding of what the different aspects of your business are that people are talking about. That means when you partner with us, you typically get a certain set of phone calls that we will make on your behalf to your customers. You should be taking advantage of those long-form phone-based interviews — get those stories out of your customers that I was talking about. Now, we also recommend that you give us every other customer. The goal here is to get as many reviews as possible across the whole spectrum to make it believable. So the nice thing about Aspect is that we do that work for you, but you should be integrating review collection into an automatic process in your strategy. So we’ve identified 11 different places that you can insert an ask for a review in order to maximize the return. I have a different video on that, but know here that you should be asking probably after you’ve done an installation or on a receipt, and you should be asking via text message after you’ve collected a solid corpus of reviews.

You can then use the Aspect platform to analyze them. We look for semantic patterns across your whole corpus of reviews to understand both the positive and negative aspects of working with your company. You can also respond to reviews that are negative — we follow a strict set of FTC guidelines for publishing reviews. But what that means is that when you respond to a review and you resolve the problem for the customer, they have the opportunity to come back onto ConsumerAffairs and update their review. This means you can take a review from a one or two star to a four or five star by responding to them and having some kind of resolution. That change, from a two to a four or a one to a five, we call those spotlight reviews. Aspect also has an assisted resolution built in — if you’re a customer of Aspect and you do resolve a complaint from a customer, we will help get in touch with that customer, like we do with phone reviews, in order to collect their side of the story and update their review. And again, these spotlight reviews that go from two to five stars or two to four stars are the best for showing future customers what will happen if something goes wrong. And I’ve been talking a lot now about these spotlight reviews because we believe that using these reviews is what converts future customers.

Now, another important thing to remember is that when you’re collecting reviews, you do want to spread them across a whole bunch of sites. And since you’re asking every person who buys from you for a review, you can start to separate them over time into the different sites. So you could ask them to leave a review on Yelp in one month, ConsumerAffairs in the next month, and Google Maps in the next month. And in that way, a company like Hoffmann wouldn’t have 11,900 reviews on Google Maps and 325 on Yelp — they should be spreading out that information across a bigger set of websites. You should be able to see a clear relationship between the reviews on ConsumerAffairs and the results in AI search results, and that way it’ll help to improve their reputation in AI Overviews and other LLMs that are ingesting that information.

And when I say leveraging reviews for conversion purposes, I mean adding the reviews that are relevant to the page that they’re on to help you convert better. So for example, if you have a testimonials page, you obviously want to have some of the longer-form reviews that explain what your company did. But if you have a landing page specific to HVAC, you want to have HVAC reviews there that talk about the different things your company does. With Aspect in particular, and for any company on ConsumerAffairs that collects reviews, whether organically or through Aspect, you get the potential to be added to the Buyers’ Choice Awards. For our main categories each year, we identify the aspects of reviews and which companies excel at them for any particular category. And so by putting the work in, it gives you a chance for additional marketing incentives like the Buyers’ Choice Award.

And so that’s my pitch to Hoffmann. I believe that if they came on board and started spreading their reviews from not just a Google-Maps-centric focus, but to other platforms, they could significantly improve their reputation online and convert future customers at a higher clip. We already know they know how to collect reviews, but collecting the right reviews with the right content could supercharge their conversion engine going into the future. And I’m Chris Kolmar with Aspect by ConsumerAffairs, where we provide a review engine to power your conversions. By capturing long-form stories from past customers, we help future customers buy from you.