Real Reputation Management – Part 3

Real Reputation Management – Part 3

TRANSCRIPT: In Step 5, we need to identify our truly satisfied customers and these are the only people we’re going to ask to review us. So, we’ve got to find a way, in our business, to find who is truly satisfied and going to give us a 5 Star review versus those who are only moderately satisfied and might give us a 2 or 3 Star review because they think that is a good thing.

Why do we just want to identify the truly satisfied? Why don’t we just ask everyone to review us? Because, even if you satisfy 90 % of your customers, and that’s a large number, your negative reviews will outnumber your positive ones. If I ask everybody I’ve done business with to review me, my negative reviews would outnumber my positive reviews two to one. People who don’t like you are much more likely to post things online about you versus people who have had a great experience. See, we expect great experiences so when we have a great experience, we don’t run out and tell everybody, but, certainly, anytime somebody fails to meet our expectations we want to tell the whole world.

The easiest way for your business to determine who is truly satisfied is to find out who is furthest down in the chain; the last person to connect with the customer. So, for a car dealer (we’ll use that as an example), I don’t want to ask the salesperson which of his customers is truly satisfied. My reasoning for that is that most car salespeople think that every one of their customers absolutely love them. We see it all the time in the car business – they get their CSI report back from their OEM (their manufacturer) and some customer we thought truly loved us just slammed us on the CSI. Turns out maybe they didn’t love us so much, they just loved the car. And, so, in this case, I’m not going to ask the salesperson. I’m going to ask the one who delivered their vehicle, if I knew someone delivered the vehicle or, maybe, I’m going to ask an F&I manager; someone in the business office, to add some questions to their repertoire of what they deal with the customer on and try to have them determine who is truly satisfied.

On the service side of the business, in a car dealership, I’m just going to use my cashier. My cashier can find out who is truly satisfied and she can simply stamp the repair order for every customer who’s truly satisfied, with a ‘smiley face’. Then, we can aggregate all those repair orders with smiley faces and, in Step 6, we send these customers a ‘thank you’ email

See, we’re only going to send ‘thank you’ emails, in Step 6, to those customers who we’ve already determined are truly satisfied. In that email, we are going to have links to those websites we identified in Step 4.

Remember, in Step 4, what did we do? We identified the 3 or 4 most influential review sites for our industry or market.

Step 6 is not a complicated step. In fact, it should take no more than 30 minutes a day provided you create a good email template, reuse that same template again and again and that you only send those emails to those who are identified as truly satisfied from the day before. I want you to give this task to a clerk. I do not want you to give it to some over worked manager and ask them to send out emails asking for great reviews because they won’t do it. They’ll start to do it one day and then they’ll stop. You’ve got to give this to someone further down the chain but have them send these out on your behalf; from your email address so that they come from the owner or the general manager of the business.

Now, in these emails we’re going to say “Hey, we hope you had great service with us and, if you did, here’s four review sites online .Feel free to review us at one or all of these sites”. One of the keys to these emails is that you have to make sure the links work. Sounds silly, but, I seen dealers and other businesses do this where they create these links to Google or Yelp, Yahoo and Kudzu and when the customer clicks on this link, it takes them to the homepage of the site. That’s not what you want. You want to make sure that these links you’ve put into your email takes the customer directly to your page on those review sites because you do not want to frustrate your customer who is truly satisfied but now that can’t even find you on that site.

(If you’d prefer, you can create a Reviews Page on your website and place just one link in the Step 6 email to it. Of course, this page should only be visible to those with the link – you do not want this link in your website’s navigation menus.)

Here’s a quick tip for that email. Using words like ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ can go a long way towards driving some great reviews.

Done correctly and targeting only the truly satisfied customers, you should expect about 5 or 10% of the people who get that email to review you online. That may seem like a very tiny number, I get it, but, you know what, not everybody wants to review you online. But, let’s be clear, those who don’t like you are much more likely to review you online, so that is why we are only going to send this email to those who are truly satisfied.