FAQs

Listed below are frequently asked questions about GatherUp as a customer feedback and online review platform. These FAQs cover many high-level questions. If you are seeking detailed specifics about our platform or features, please see our User Guide for more information.

General Questions?

What is GatherUp?

GatherUp is designed to let a business or an agency working on their behalf easily implement a customer feedback and online review management solution. The product automatically requests and tracks customer feedback, prevents bad reviews, streams reviews out to the business website and encourages happy customers to leave online reviews across the Internet.

ProTip: Online Reviews are becoming increasingly important in the decision process of your customers and clients. Search Engines such as Google rank websites with reviews higher!

Will GatherUp work for my type of business?

GatherUp can be used for “any” type of business that can benefit from a consistent process for generating, capturing, and responding to customer feedback so they can create a virtuous cycle of customer engagement and service improvement.

GatherUp is designed to let a small business (or an agency working on their behalf) easily implement a best practice customer feedback/review management process.

The product automatically solicits and tracks feedback, minimizes the number of bad reviews, pushes testimonials out to the business website and encourages happy customers to leave reviews across the Internet.

Key benefits of GatherUp:

#1 Get better search results: The more reviews and testimonials you get, the better your search results become. Which leads to more customers and more reviews.

#2 Capture feedback: Get in the habit of creating a dialogue with customers so you can build on your strengths, catch problems early, and constantly improve your service.

#3 Generate word-of-mouth: GatherUp helps you generate the referrals, testimonials, and other word- of-mouth feedback that leads to repeat business.

Do I need a website to use GatherUp?

The short answer is “No” — You do not need to have a website to use our platform.

GatherUp provides you with everything you need including a feedback page and email forms to communicate with your customers right away.

However, we encourage every business owner to have a website.GatherUp will allow you to embed customer testimonials on your website and ask for feedback right on your website.

GatherUp uses the Google friendly Schema.org format to display your selected reviews and testimonials, which are indexed as unique content of your site.GatherUp of course works on all types of websites – HTML, PHP, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and more. The design is fully responsive for Phone and Tablet uses and works on any Mac and PC browser such as Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Firefox etc.

Do I need a physical street address to use GatherUp?

The short answer is “No” — You do not need to have a physical address.

A physical address is only needed to register for GatherUp. Use your business mailing address or any other address. After sign up click on “Settings -> Email Templates” and you can upload a business logo or image at the bottom of the page that will replace the address and Google Maps box in all your customer interactions.

Does GatherUp require a contract or is there a Termination Fee?

GatherUp does not have any hidden fees, contracts, locks or termination fees. Your account is billed monthly and you can cancel at any time. You can view our terms of use related to termination here.

We won’t hold your reviews and data hostage either — You can export all your customers and reviews at any time.

Does GatherUp work on any PC, Mac, tablet, or Smartphone?

“Yes” to all of the above.

#1 GatherUp uses “Responsive design” and works great on any PC, Mac, tablet, iPAd, iPhone, Android phone and more.

#2 GatherUp works with all modern browser versions of Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox etc.

#3 GatherUp also works on all types of websites – HTML, PHP, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and more.

Does GatherUp require a lot of my time each week?

GatherUp is a fully automated solution and for many businesses only requires about 15 to 30 minutes of work each week or less depending on many factors and settings you utilize.

Once you have created your account you can take advantage of several automated features, such as automatically send and receive feedback emails and alerts. Create AI-generated review replies and send automated responses to positive reviews. Automatically approve reviews to show on the web. As well as automated follow up and reminder emails to just name a few.

Please visit the UserGuide found here for detailed information about using GatherUp.

What type of support is available?

GatherUp offers many ways to get answers and help using our platform. These methods include:

How does GatherUp compare to other reputation software?

GatherUp was created and is maintained by well known industry experts Mike Blumenthal, Don Campbell and Aaron Weiche. We focus on providing an affordable, effective and intuitive customer feedback and online review platform for you.

Only with GatherUp can you be assured that changes in local search, schema markup and reputation management find their way into your online presence right away.

Don’t trust anonymous reputation builder tools who don’t show who is behind the product with your good name.

Does GatherUp offer Listings Management as well?

GatherUp partners with Whitespark to bring the industry’s best listings management service to our customers. Click here to learn more and receive 10% off any Whitespark service by using promo code “traject”.

Does GatherUp offer a free trial?

Yes, GatherUp is happy to offer a free 14-day trial of our software. Our free trial lets you test drive the most important features. Add a credit card to your payment section to activate your subscription and keep using GatherUp for as long as you like. 

What if I get busy? Can I get an extension on my free trial?

We recommend trying to get as much done as you can within the 14-day window to see the full value of GatherUp. You should be able to send a review request, connect Google reviews, respond to reviews and even share a review on Social Media within 14 days.

But we understand things come up. Reach out to the support team or email your sales representative to talk about plans for an extension.

How do I activate my subscription once my free trial ends?

It’s easy to get started with GatherUp once the trial period ends. You may be prompted to add payment upon logging in after the trial has ended. To avoid losing access, log in before your trial ends and go to the Admin settings (where your name is shown in the upper right hand corner) and select Payment Information. Add a valid credit card and your account will be activated.

A recurring monthly charge will be submitted to the card on file once the account has been activated.

Do I have full use of the application during the free trial?

We offer all the features you need during our 14-day free trial. You’ll have the ability to:

  • Send review requests to customers
  • Respond to reviews using AI-generated SmartReply
  • Market your reviews with Social Sharing and the Review Widget
  • Gain insights from our many reports, including the Smart Insights report

We do not allow use of SMS marketing and Web-to-Text Widget features during the free trial. Activate your account to start engaging with your happiest customers and website visitors! 

As an agency or reseller, am I able to offer my clients a free trial?

Currently, if an agency or reseller would like to offer their client a free trial they simply do not have to charge a client for two weeks worth of use. However, the agency/reseller account WILL be charged by GatherUp.

However, this is a frequent request and important to our agency/reseller partners. Thus we are working on this functionality in Q1 2024. Stay tuned for updates. 

Best Practices & Encouraging Customer Feedback

Do Google, Bing, and other search engines index feedback and testimonials left by my customer?

Yes — all 1st party review content presented by the Review Widget and Tag Widget is able to be indexed by Google and Bing as part of your website. It is marked up in the Schema.org review format, a rich-snippet format that Google and Bing recognizes. In some cases, we’ve seen testimonials pages get enough page rank that the review “stars”, known as snippets, also show up in the Google search results.

I do not have customer email addresses. Can GatherUp still help?

Yes we can help. Many businesses don’t have email addresses or mobile numbers for their customers.

Now is a good time to start collecting them. GatherUp works great on mobile devices like iPhone, Android phones, iPads, etc. so you can just add the customer’s name and email address right there while they are in your office.

GatherUp provides a “Kiosk Mode” and a short direct feedback “URL” unique to your business. These methods actually help you acquire the customer’s email address.

Kiosk mode is great for using GatherUp on site while with your customers. The Unique Feedback URL can be added to printed media, invoices, bills, tabs, receipts, business cards, QR codes, SMS etc – and does not require you to know the customers email or name.

Does GatherUp syndicate reviews to other sites?

GatherUp does not syndicate your review content. Duplicating and syndicating content is actually frowned upon by the search engines and can hurt your search engine optimization, not help it.

GatherUp captures feedback from your customers that can be used on your website, and encourages your customers to leave you online reviews on sites like Google, Facebook and others by making it easy for them.

This approach provides unique, non duplicated content in the form of testimonials and reviews that the search engines love.

More Information on the topic can be found in the GatherUp User Guide

Can I give access to GatherUp to other staff or team members - especially if we have multiple locations?

Yes, GatherUp allows you to create a login for other members of your team. Owners, managers, consultants, service staff can get access to GatherUp so that they can access their Customer Dashboard, send out Feedback Requests, and get email notifications.

Billing and other businesses in your GatherUp Dashboard will not be visible to them.

You can even use the Client Staff Form to let users without a log-in add customers to the platform.

A tutorial can be found here in the GatherUp User Guide

Additional FAQs

Can our agency use and resell GatherUp to service our clients?

Yes, GatherUp offers a whitelabel version of our platform for your agency to resell. GatherUp is successfully used by digital agencies of any size around the world to assist with their customer reputation management, customer feedback and online review needs.

Learn more on the Agencies page of our website.

Does GatherUp have an API?

Yes we do have an API for integration.

GatherUp offers an ever increasing library of API’s. Please click here for more on how to automate many aspects of our feedback process and reporting.

What do others say about GatherUp?

GatherUp, previously GetFiveStars, has been reviewed, written about and cited for our expertise by many online. We also offer reviews from our own customers on our Testimonial page for your to read.

Read other online articles mentioning GatherUp (previously known as Get Five Stars):

Forbes Magazine

SmallBiz Trends

Local Visibility System

SEO Book

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