Collect and understand customers
Run referrals without incentivizing reviews
Invite known customers to make voluntary introductions while keeping referral rewards separate from public reviews.
10 min read · Written for business teamsAcerite gives an eligible customer a private referral link. A referred person can share limited contact details and consent, after which an authorized team can qualify and convert the prospect.
The business can measure customer introductions and reward genuine referral outcomes without review gating, copied customer identities, or unverified revenue claims.
Owners, marketing teams, location managers, sales teams, privacy owners, and reward approvers.
Keep referrals and public reviews separate
Why this matters: A referral program can reward an introduction or verified conversion, but paying for public reviews damages trust and may violate platform or consumer rules.
- Never make eligibility or a reward depend on leaving, editing, or improving a public review.
- Use completed transactions, known or repeat-customer evidence, private feedback, private surveys, services, tags, status, recency, or a documented manual choice.
- State clearly on the public form that any referral reward is unrelated to a public review.
- Keep Google review collection available under the same fair rules for every customer.
Set up a program safely
- 1
Choose locations and eligibility
Use only evidence the business is authorized to use and make each rule explainable to staff.
- 2
Approve customer language
Have the privacy owner approve the notice, consent, optional terms, and the limited fields the prospect form will collect.
- 3
Decide whether a reward exists
If enabled, define the referral-only trigger, amount or benefit, currency, accounting owner, approval, fulfillment, and reversal process.
- 4
Connect delivery and CRM ownership
Confirm which approved system sends invitations and which system owns qualification and conversion evidence.
- 5
Pilot one location
Test consent refusal, cooldown, revocation, expiry, duplicate submission, suspected self-referral, and adapter failure before activating broadly.
Invite an advocate
Acerite references the existing customer record and shows staff only masked identity. An explainable evaluation can mark the customer eligible; a manager may then enroll, suppress, or opt the advocate out.
Outbound email, SMS, or WhatsApp invitations require current channel consent and enter the approved I02 Messaging queue. A copied link, QR code, or non-transport conversation intent does not itself send a message. Marketing workflow wiring remains an I03 integration seam.
Manage prospects and conversions
- The public form collects only enabled contact fields, shows consent and privacy language, and gives a generic completion response.
- Staff see masked contact values and may move a prospect through contacted, qualified, converted, lost, or invalid states.
- Conversion needs an authorized source, evidence reference, time, and idempotency key; a form submission alone is not a sale.
- Suspected self-referral, repeated-client, or excessive-volume signals require human review and are not fraud findings.
Approve rewards and read the numbers
Eligible rewards remain pending until an authorized operator approves and fulfills them with an external reference. Reversals preserve history. Referral reporting counts invites, non-duplicate prospects, qualification, conversion, conversion rate, and fulfilled reward cost; it does not invent revenue or return on investment.