A: Hey Eli,

These are important questions and deserve a straight answer.

Let me walk through exactly how Spokk works against each point:

"You can't give an incentive to leave a review"
Spokk does not incentivize Google reviews. Rewards & incentives are tied to submitting feedback -- not to leaving a public review. The review is simply the natural next step in the flow. Because the customer has already shared their experience through the feedback form, Spokk uses that to generate a pre-drafted review. There is no friction of writing from scratch, so genuinely happy customers often choose to post it. Receiving feedback does not guarantee a review but it reduces the friction of writing a review from scratch. That is organic behavior, not an incentive.

"You can't ask for reviews while someone is at your business"
Turn on automation triggers and the timing for sending requests are fully customizable -- you choose the delay, the channel (SMS or email), and the sequence. You have full control to make sure the request always goes out after the customer has left.

"Customers can't leave staff names in reviews"
What Google prohibits is a staff member pressuring a customer to mention their name in a review. That is not what Spokk does. In the feedback form, the customer selects the staff member themselves, sees their name and photo, and rates them individually. The staff member only asks for feedback, not a review. If a staff member receives a 5-star rating, their name is included in the AI-generated review text. This reflects what would happen organically anyway -- if someone received great service, they would naturally want to give that person recognition.

"You have to ask everyone -- not just happy customers"
Google calls this review gating and their policy does not permit it. It is a feature many businesses want, Spokk provides the option to turn on review gating for the classic form but we deeply discourage it through warnings and labels. Some people use other platforms beside Google, so they have this option available to them if they choose to use it. Realistically we have seen that this is not required. An unhappy customer wants to vent and the feedback form allows that. They resort to reviews only if they can't do that or they had a horrible experience. If this is the case, they would not need Spokk, they would directly post the negative review anyway.

"You can't ask them to leave a specific review or mention a product or service"
Spokk generates an AI-drafted review from the customer's own submitted feedback. They select the services they used themselves. This is to ensure, as before that staff members dont try to influence the review and force services mentioned in the review. With Spokk, the customer selects the service they used and is naturally included in the review, totally how this would happen in a real world scenario. People will mention what the service they received in the review.

The core Spokk flow -- request feedback after the visit, collect genuine responses, then offer a frictionless path to a public review -- is designed around real experiences and compliant with the spirit of Google's guidelines.

If you have any further questions, let us know, we’re always here to help.