Blog Post

How to get customer reviews without asking

Andrew Hurrell • February 8, 2021

Attract new customers with customer reviews

I think it's universality known that if you are running a local business, then having reviews from existing customers across the internet is the fundamental building block for attracting new customers.

And doing this without you, or your staff, asking your customers is what I will be addressing further into this article, towards the end.

So, why do we find it so hard to ask for a review in the first place?

Well, let us take a step back and look at what is really going on in the first place.

To explain this, I'm going to use a typical scenario outlined below:

You're the owner or manager of a home improvement company, and you don't need to be sold on the idea of collecting reviews from your customers once you've completed an installation.

So you task the fitters with asking the customer if they would leave a review before they pack up their tools and move on to the next job.

To make it easier for the fitters you tell them that if the customers leave a review, they will get an incentive from the company, plus the company will even give the customer a voucher for their time. Simple!!

Quite the opposite!

Customer feedback centre reviews help gain more customers

In the first place, most fitters aren't comfortable asking for feedback in front of the customer. Even if the job has gone to plan and they know the customer is delighted.

So they will 'forget' to ask, even though you tell them every week how important it is to the company's future growth.

Secondly, even if they ask, the biggest challenge then kicks in when the customer then asks 'so how do we leave you a review?'

Now let's fast forward 10 minutes, and the customer's laptop is now open, and the fitter is explaining how they need a Google account to leave a review, or even if they have a Google account where to go to find the correct place to leave a review.

Frustration is now setting in from both parties. The feel-good factor from having their shiny new replacement windows that the customer had just 10 minutes ago is now dissipating rapidly into dispair.

The fitters and customer's relationship is now stressed, whereas it was fabulous before this whole review asking situation.

I could go on as there are 100's of different scenarios that lead to the same outcome.

But they all revert to this:

Staff feeling uncomfortable

Your latest happy customer now feeling pressured to do something whilst someone is looking over their shoulder.

So how do you solve this issue?

You could hope your customers will leave your company a review without being prompted.

Or, politely ask for a review, and great news they told you they definitely would, they'll do it as soon as they've had dinner that night.

But you're still waiting and waiting.

Rarely does this happen, and it's not that your customer doesn't want to, but as soon as you leave them life kicks in again and the time needed to write that review invariably never happens, the moment has now passed.

You could chase up with a phone call a few days later to remind them, but you're going down the awkward conversation route for both parties again.

So what's the solution?

The variable here is a human asking, so wouldn't it make sense to remove this element.

How do we do this?

30 day risk free trial with the Customer Feedback Centre gaining new customers

Introduce a service that will automatically ask your customers to leave you a review without creating that uncomfortable feeling, and make it as simple as possible for them to do this.

You probably have systems that run the day to day management of your business so doesn't it make sense to do the same with building a predictable ongoing reputation?

If this resonates with you, I would love to see if we can help you at the Customer Feedback Centre by offering you a 30 day NO RISK trial.

Until next time,

Andrew

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