If the popular rating and review sites aren’t playing nicely, create your own path to gathering clients’ post-transaction thoughts.

A five-star Yelp review is good as gold, but what if your happy customer doesn’t have an account?

Google offers a form creator that you can control for free, making it a foolproof method for gathering thoughts from your clients in a way that can both improve your service standards and generate marketing fodder for your website.

1. Visit docs.google.com/forms and click on the + sign under “Start a new form.”

2. Title your form something welcoming, such as, “Share your thoughts with us!” Use the form description directly underneath the title to add subtle brand context, such as, “We appreciate your choosing to entrust your recent real estate transaction to XYZ Properties, and we value your feedback.”

3. Add a field for the client’s name. Don’t forget to make this (and any other question you always want answered) mandatory by toggling the “required” button on.

4. Ask them to rank their experience on a four-point scale using the multiple choice question option. Why four? Offering too many options may be overwhelming, and if you use an uneven number, many respondents will just pick the middle one as a default. Four requires them to evaluate whether their experience was overall a positive or negative one.

5. Add a “paragraph” response asking them to put their feedback in their own words. You might want to create two questions, one focusing on what they liked and one focusing on where your company could improve.

6. Ask for the “perpetual, universal, and non-revocable” permission to use their name and any comments by using the “checkboxes” question format. Without this, you shouldn’t post their comments on your site or anywhere else public.

7. Once it’s created, you can share your feedback form via email or social media or by embedding it directly on your website, giving customers a variety of access points.

8. You can easily connect the form to a Google spreadsheet, where the results will automatically fill in, making it easier to track service successes and areas in need of improvement over time.

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