Have you ever wondered if it’s worth collecting customer reviews from your plumbing or pest control customers after you have done the work?
In this video, I’ve collected and summarised the most recent online data about the return on investment (ROI) from collecting online reviews from your customers and getting them published online.
How Do I Know My Business Is Delivering Good Service?
Let’s face it plumbing, pest control or any other home services business is competitive.
Do you see your customers as transactions? That is you come and fix their plumbing problem, and that’s it.
If you do, this means:
- You will be competing against other operators who treat the customer based on their lifetime value. These operators can afford to pay more to get a new customer because they earn more money from the customer in the long run.
- You will be constantly buying new customers through marketing activity to keep your business running.
- You will likely lose the marketing battle for the customer because you cannot afford to pay as much as these operators.
Looking at your customers as a lifetime relationship is the way to go. And if you want to keep customers, you have to be sure that you are delivering good service. My pest control operator always leaves a survey to complete at the end of the service, along with the report.
The only way of knowing if your service was OK – or great – is to actually ask your customers.
So from a basic business operation point of view, you need to ask customers how you doing on an ongoing basis. That way you can be sure that you have some competitive advantage and that you are delivering the service that your customers expect.
And excellent customer service increases word of mouth referrals.
Is It Worth Getting My Customer Reviews Online?
You have you ever looked at restaurant reviews or accommodation reviews when you’re looking to go to a restaurant or somewhere from holiday?
It’s very likely that you have, and that you have found these reviews to be useful.
That’s how customers feel as well.
Sure you get new customers by referral and word-of-mouth – they don’t need online social proof because the person who referred than gave it already.
But if you want to do any other marketing activity, like advertising, AdWords, letterbox drops, networking or Facebook, the first thing someone is going to do after they see your promotion is the go and look at the online reviews for your business.
If there are none, most people won’t trust the business.
And if there are negative reviews then you got an even more significant problem.
Good, Recent Customer Reviews Are the New Local SEO
To generate more traffic and visitors to your website so you can get more leads then reviews are important in getting your Google My Business listing showing on the first page of Google.