How to Ask Customers for Quality Reviews

Reviews are an essential marketing tool for any home improvement business–what your customers and employees say about you online has become too big to ignore.

• • 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (Kelsey/Bia)
  • 91% of 18-34 year olds trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations (BrightLocal). 
  • 93% of consumers say an online review influenced their purchasing decisions (Podium). 
    

Of all these stats, perhaps the most surprising is this one - 68% of your customers would be willing to leave a review if you asked (BrightLocal).

Here’s the kicker - if it was easy, you’d probably have hundreds of reviews by now. 

In this article, we’ll talk about how you can overcome the most common challenges that businesses face when it comes to getting more legitimate 5-star quality reviews. 

Benefits of Having Reviews? 

1. Providing reviews helps build social proof and trustworthiness with your company. 
2. Local search rankings increase by providing recent positive reviews. You can actually boost your SEO by having positive, updated reviews. Specifically, in Google My Business, businesses are ranked by the number of reviews and also most recent updates to the page.  
3. Impacts your Bottom Line. At the end of the day, having a strong reputation online will lead to repeat business, upsell opportunities, and more leads.

What challenges do businesses face with Reviews?

1. Takes time to manually reach out. If you don’t have your review process automated, it takes valuable time out of sales reps or customer service’s day to follow up with previous customers and ask them for reviews.
2. Not asking the right client. If you blanketly reach out to all customers that sold, you may get some bad apples. Maybe the product wasn’t installed yet, or something went wrong. Sometimes, this can lead to customers writing neutral or negative reviews - and you don’t want that!
3. Doesn’t feel personal to the customer. Automating the review process does save time, but there is no denying that it usually looks automated and not authentic. To get quality reviews, it’s important to ask customers with genuine honesty at the right time.

How to Ask for Reviews

#1 Ask for feedback first.

Qualify which customers would be best to ask for reviews by asking about their experience. If they had a positive experience with your company, ask them for the review at that point. If they have an issue, right the wrong. Help your customer have a better experience.

"Hi [Contact First Name], this is [User First Name], Sales Manager at Longhouse Roofing. Thanks for choosing us for your project! I wanted to check in and see how everything is working out?"

#2 Ask the right customers.

Target customers that fit with your target audience. If you aiming to run bigger projects, reach out to clients that might be able to offer feedback for that specific market.

"Hi [Contact First Name], this is [User First Name] with Longhouse Roofing. Thanks for choosing us for your project! A lot of our business comes from word-of-mouth, so I wanted to see if it would be alright for me to send you a link to leave us a review. Let me know whenever you have time!"

#3 Automate the process, but keep it as a personal touch.

Your review emails shouldn’t feel like marketing. Have your review emails come from someone that the customer had a direct relationship with through the sales journey such as the sales representative that sold them, or the installer that completed the project in their home.

By automating this process, you will still be able to constantly ask for feedback without taxing those individuals to ask customers one by one.

"Hello [Contact First Name], this is [User First Name]. My team came out to install your roof in [Install Month]. I wanted to check in and see how your roof is holding up, and see if you might like to write a review for Longhouse?"

How can Hatch help? 

Hatch can create hyper-specific campaigns to ask for feedback, or send links to your Google My Business, Yelp, or Facebook review submissions directly to your customers from inside our conversation platform. Reach out to our team to get started.