Don’t Build a Review Program—Build a Review Culture!
The days when customer reviews were only “nice to have” is a thing of the past. Reviews are essential to your success, having become the mainstay of customers’ assessments of your company. They have the power to guide new customers to your door—or away from it.
Why Are Reviews Essential to Your Business?
According to BrightLocal, a local SEO platform, their 2022 Local Consumer Review Survey confirmed 99 percent of consumers have used the internet to find information about a local business in the last year. This staggering statistic highlights just how critical reviews are in this day and age.
But why? Simply distilled: reviews make you more visible and appear more trustworthy to potential customers. When someone is looking for a home services company to help them, they want to know others agree with their choice. The more reviewers who confirm your company, the better the potential customer feels about contacting you and giving you their business.
What Is a Review Culture and How Do You Build One?
To garner the reviews you need, at BxB Media, we advocate creating a review culture—not a review program. When a review culture is executed properly, it has additional offshoots that help your company in more ways than generating reviews.
When we refer to a review culture, we’re talking about the way your company pursues and encourages reviews across your entire team. It becomes part of your brand, who your company is. To generate this type of culture, you need to develop and support it via attitude, behavior, and recognition:
1. You need to instill a company-wide attitude where everything each team member does is recognized as important. This has a ripple effect on positivity, which can result in exceptional customer service.
2. This leads to exemplary behavior with customers by your team members, prompting reviews or referrals. Happy customers want others to know they’re happy.
3. Recognition of desired attitudes and behavior in your team members helps keep everyone motivated. You can recognize desired performances with verbal praise, financial incentives, and certifications.
Benefits of a Review Culture
In addition to increased reviews, promoting a review culture in your company, in lieu of a straight review program, produces beneficial byproducts across the board:
• Improved level of service
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Improved team morale and pride in company
• Improved employee retention and recruiting
• Increased revenue
3 Best Ways to Get Reviews
In a review culture, we recommend embedding these three avenues for getting reviews into your everyday processes:
1. A personal request from your office team or technicians. When they are speaking to customers at the point of service or following an appointment, if everything is satisfactory with the customer, have your team ask for a review.
Or anytime they think it’s an appropriate moment, your team should ask. The more practice they have doing this, the more second nature it’ll become for them. Best results always come at the moment of reciprocity.
2. A request through an email or text. Sending a short, but sweet, message thanking the customer for their business and then asking for a Google review is highly effective. Putting a direct link in the message to the review page makes everything convenient.
3. An embedded request in your software. If you utilize a home services software program (e.g., ServiceTitan, FieldEdge), embedding your request in automatic communications to the customer makes it efficient and consistent.
Talk to Us About Reviews for Your Company
If you’d like to discuss how to implement a review culture in your company in further detail or anything about reviews, get in touch today. We would love to help you grow your company even more!