Why customers decide to buy from your company is not a mystery anymore.
No one buys blindly. No one relies on just a great website.
Everyone does their research. It could be a product review on Amazon. It could be a company review on Google Maps. It could be an app review in an App Store. It could be a Reddit discussion or a referral from a friend that already bought from you. It will actually be all of these and more.
YOU need to make sure that wherever an opinion about your company lives it is not a deterrent to the next potential customer coming on board.
This takes time but here’s what I did at Trexity to build up our ratings.
When we started, we weren’t asking our customers how they felt about our service so we built a very simple survey in Google Docs that asked 4 questions about their delivery experience. It was not fancy. It was not complicated. It is still what we use today, 4 years later.
Our survey link was included in the email confirming delivery was completed for all three of our customers — the merchant, the recipient and the courier doing the delivery. We needed to hear from all of them about their experiences.
We started receiving feedback immediately.
Originally this allowed us to become the first to know if something went wrong on a delivery. We found out if a courier was negligent or something was missing or the pickup/drop off experience was not up to par. This allowed us to take action quickly — before it was too late to fix it.
Then we used our survey results to focus our efforts on reviews on just one platform — Google Maps. Why here? We knew that our customers, the merchants, would look for social validation on the platform. We had a 1.7 star rating at the time. If you were a merchant, looking to extend your customer experience with a delivery partner, would you trust a company with a 1.7 star rating?
There is no way to avoid bad reviews — this is a fact of life — but we could deliberately drown those bad reviews with a ton of great ones. So this is what we set out to do.
We started to ask anyone who provided great feedback in our own internal survey to give us a review on Google. At the time, we were receiving dozens of survey responses per week and so we asked and they responded. The key here is to be authentic. I actually started sending the email requests personally one at a time which opened up great conversations with customers as well.
Today we receive hundreds of survey responses per day and we still do get 1 star responses but our 5 star reviews outweigh them 50 to 1. I’m still sending the emails personally every Sunday morning. To grow your business reputation you need to make sure you are putting in the effort and this is the way I do it. If there is an issue, I’d rather have that dialogue in private via email than in public where it could impact our business permanently.
We went from 1.7 stars to 4.7 stars, one email and one review at a time.