Any in-home care agency listed in Caring.com's home care directory for senior care searchers online can receive online reviews from their cognitively-healthy clients and clients' family members. These consumer reviews can be positive, negative, or in-between, and are published (or removed) based on the Review Guidelines. The reviews are so important to senior care searchers online that Caring.com uses them to rank the results for the in-home care directory. Caring.com has also found that listings with reviews can get more inquiries, and agencies with online reviews are more likely to get callbacks from prospects (and ultimately conversions to new clients) than agencies without online reviews.

Given how helpful and influential online reviews are, here's how your agency can build its collection of great reviews on our site.

How Any Agency Gets Reviews:

• Dedicated review submission form - Every listing in the Caring.com directory has a unique link for cognitively-healthy clients and their family members to submit their feedback about a home care agency's services in reviews on Caring.com. This link is accessible for the agency to share with its customer via the "Write a Review" button at the top of the reviews section on the listing. Consumer reviews submitted via that form are typically processed within three (3) business days, so it's the fastest, easiest way for the agency to get new reviews, particularly with more older adults and their adult children online nowadays than ever before.

• Home Care Pulse program - For agencies partnered with Home Care Pulse, we have integration between their telephonic surveys of home care clients and our reviews program. It's easy to opt-in and there's no additional charge to have the feedback pushed to Caring.com as reviews.

Another Option for Caring.com Partners:

• Phone review program — We offer a toll-free phone number that your agency clients and their family members can call to give their review by phone. Our review collection agents will guide callers through a brief, relevant interview to record quality reviews detailing the consumers' firsthand experiences with our partners' in-home care services. Contact our reviews team to get the phone number for your happy customers. Alternatively, home care agencies partnered with Caring.com can send us the names and telephone numbers of cognitively-healthy clients and their family members (with their explicit consent for sharing that info with Caring.com) and we’ll call them for their reviews. Note: This option can take longer than online submissions, given extra steps involved (from reaching the reviewer by phone, to transcribing the review from the recording phone call, as well as uploading and processing the review against the guidelines). It's a good option though for folks who aren't comfortable online yet.

How to Respond to the Reviews Your Community Receives:

All home care agencies with reviews on their Caring.com listing can publish a response — for both positive and negative reviews — and listed businesses also have the option to request removal of the review if there are fact errors or guidelines concerns.

Our partners will receive a New Review Alert emailed to their inbox the instant any new reviews are published on their listing. Those alerts include convenient quick links to publish a response or contest the review, and by using the alerts, the message reaches our highest priority processing queue. Contact your Caring.com account executive if you need to make changes for who at your agency is getting the alerts. (Don't know who your account executive is? Please contact hc_helpdesk@caring.com for help with your account.)

Have questions about online reviews? Our reviews team can be reached by email or phone: reviews@caring.com or (650) 762-8190. We also have an entire section of this blog dedicated to information about the reviews program — please do check out the best practices and case studies we’ve showcased in the Reviews Info center.