How To Gain & Maintain a 5-Star Online Reputation (PART 6)

 

How To Gain & Maintain a 5-Star Online Reputation (PART 6)

TRANSCRIPT: Alright. Now we’ve got a strategy, we got step 5, we’ve got to identify our raving fans.

We got to figure out who’s most likely to give us a 5 star review. This is critical. It’s absolutely critical. You cannot just ask everybody to review you. We’ll get to that in a minute, but the how and the when that we can identify raving fans is the important part, so here’s the when. There are really 3 times that we can identify a raving fan. One is immediately while they’re on our premises, okay? Another way to identify a raving fan is after we send them a quick email or text survey, all right? We can also identify a raving fan after they’ve already left us a positive review, so those are the 3 times and the 3 ways that we can identify a raving fan, so let’s talk about identifying a raving fan immediately.

Folks, this is the easiest and most effective way to identify raving fans when your business has a built in checkout location, so if you have a cashier or a reception desk or someplace where everybody who does business with you funnels through when they leave, the person who mans that desk, that cash register, whatever, that person can identify raving fans. This is also a great way to identify raving fans when your business is small and you personally know many of your best customers, so let’s say you run a small coffee shop or something local and you’re the owner and you’re there all the time, you can identify who your raving fans are, you know this is also a great time and a great way to identify raving fans, when you don’t have sophisticated CRM tools, customer relationship management tools.

Now we’re talking about identifying your raving fan immediately so with a business with a checkout location, and I like to think of a car dealership with a service cashier, just using a simple smiley stamp like we have here below this reception desk, just a simple smiley stamp on the customer’s paperwork can let someone up the paperwork chain know that that person that we identified is a potential raving fan. All right, how about a quick email or a text survey?

Let’s show this email. This is the easiest and most effective way to identify raving fans when your business has many customer touch points, like a car dealership, so I’ve got 25 sales people who work for me and each one gets checked out, each sale that we make, each customer gets checked out by a different manager, I don’t really have a single customer touch point for them so I can use a quick one question survey that we’re going to look at in just a second.

I can use this email survey because I have multiple customer touch points or your business provides a complicated service like a realtor. If you’re a realtor and you provide this complicated service, you’re going to need something like a one question survey like we’re showing. You can also use this when your business has multiple locations or multiple outside service techs like a plumbing company, and you can use this, obviously you need to be a company that routinely collects email addresses or has permission to text, so let’s take a quick look at this one question survey.

I’ve got the customer’s email address, I send them a quick survey, I say, “Dear Bob, your business is incredibly important to us and personally, I value your opinion. Would you please answer this one question for me? Would you recommend Steve’s Pluming to a friend? Yes or no? Please reply with your response and let me know if you’d like me to follow-up with you. Best wishes.” If they respond no, I’ve got an issue. I’ll call them on the phone, I’ll do what I can to fix their issue, but when they respond yes that they would recommend me to a friend, I just identified a raving fan, haven’t I?

All right. Now we also want to identify raving fans after they left a positive review. See, raving fans are rare and all companies should employ this method. Someone who’s left a positive review, that is a raving fan, we’re going to go after them and ask them for more reviews and here’s why. There’s an MIT study released in 2014 that shows that only about 1.5% of consumers write reviews. Let me let that sink in for just a second. Only about 1.5% of consumers write reviews. These are the influencers, yet remember what Dimensional Research said. They said that 90% of consumers say that online reviews influence their buying decision, so 1 and a half percent are writing reviews, 90% are influenced by them, I’ve got to identify the 1 and a half, don’t I?

Identifying those who’ve already reviewed you and asking them to review you again for some additional love, it isn’t wrong. It’s called “Practical,” right? Let’s enlist them.