A number of surveys have shown that consumers look at online reviews before making a purchase. Here's how this impacts the home services industry.
Home services businesses are very localized to their customer base. This means you are being found by people physically near you. Showing up on that Google map with a high ranking is going to help you get more inbound prospects. A recent GlassHouse survey showed that 76% of buyers always read reviews and 88% will read them if the purchase is ‘significant.’
Google reviews use several factors in how they ‘stack rank’ your business. A simple search of “HVAC companies near me” will yield dozens of results, but only the top 3 will show on the first page of results, and the next click of the mouse will only show the top 22 (which may include some paid ads).
Buyer psychology tends to favor feedback at scale. More reviews of your business will look better to a potential buyer than just a couple (even if they are good).
4.5 beats 5.0 (most of the time). People don’t often believe in 'perfect.' They expect there to be some problems at times. If you are showing a 5.0-star rating on a low volume of reviews, your buyers may not think it's credible. Getting reviews from as many clients as possible is important in getting a strong but not perfect average.
Buyer feedback can help you find gaps in your service offering. If you can create an easy way to collect and review buyer feedback, make sure to consider how the overall feedback can help you improve your business. If you are consistently seeing the same types of feedback, it's important to determine how you can resolve these issues to address what customers are telling you.
Important factors in your ranking
Here's what goes into a Google ranking and how it should shape your approach.
Overall rating average: Obviously, you want good reviews. Ultimately, if you are getting poor scores, you're not going to be a competitive choice for potential clients.
Volume of reviews: More reviews are going to lift your ranking on search. Generally, the listings on the first page of results are going to have significantly more reviews (on average) than those on the second page. Boost your ranking with more reviews.
Recency of your reviews: This is an ongoing process (not a one-and-done activity). It's important to build review aggregation into your overall process so that you make it easy for your customers and your team. The older your reviews, the further down the list you move.
The ‘weight’ of your reviews: Getting clients who leave more reviews in general to review you will weight their feedback (slightly) in your favor. This is not necessarily something you can control, but finding those heavy Google review users should be part of your strategy to collect as many reviews as you can.
Tools and recommendations to consider
Optimize your Google business page: The first step is making sure you have set up your business account so that your listing has accurate information and you can monitor the feedback you are getting.
Timeliness of request: The faster you can get in front of your clients, the more likely they will be to fill out your request for a review. Think about how you get your techs to ask for a review on-site. Consider comping or spiffing your team on their collected 4- and 5-star reviews and train your reps to ask for a 5-star review.
Delivery methods: In-person requests are great, but sending easy-to-use links will increase the chances of your customer leaving a review. Some commonly used options include sharing a link via text, email, or both.
Send them to their preferred platform: If you send someone a request for a Google review but they don’t have a Google account, they can’t fill it out. The same goes for other review sites like Yelp. Being able to send customers a link to their preferred review platform (even if it’s not Google) will boost your review quantity.
Ease of use: Make it easy to use by reducing the number of clicks and actions they have to take. If the client has to fill out a ton of information or give personal information, they are going to be less likely to fill out a review. If they have to manually type in a code or something from a printout (like restaurants used to do), they are going to be less likely to fill it out. Make it easy for your customers to give you quick and simple feedback to boost your volume.
Ideal customers will give you better reviews: Unfortunately, some people just don’t give good online reviews to businesses, or they tend to be overly critical online due to a ‘sense of anonymity.’ Being able to request reviews from your ideal customer profiles and/or clients where you feel there is a strong likelihood of a good fit will do a lot to improve the overall quality of your reviews and boost your scores.
Tools to help you collect reviews
Podium - Podium is a large platform that offers review collection as well as a number of customer communication tools and invoice/payment options. It's a good choice when you have more complex customer communication needs and integrations with multiple internal operating systems.
Birdeye - Birdeye offers a wide range of communications and client interaction tools as well as easy reporting and analytics. If you are doing a very high volume of business and have lots of sales channels (social, inbound, outbound, etc.) they can help consolidate communications and measurement in one place.
Reviews.io - This system includes reviews, customer surveys, and product reviews. They have a unique offering that allows video and images, but may be better-suited to retail than home services (for some).
TrueReview.co - This integrated system focuses on customer reviews and surveys. They have multiple distribution options (email, text, etc.) and serve the home services industry by offering integrations with leading back-office tools. This is a really solid option that is very focused on review aggregation.
Liftify.com - Liftify focuses on helping you collect more reviews and has offerings for both small businesses and franchise systems. They also have real time engagement reporting and integrations to systems to power your requests.
Power Reviews - Power Reviews has a more customizable set of options to collect more than just Google review data. They can function as your own customer feedback loop and are well-suited to large businesses. They tend to serve larger brands and companies that offer high-value purchases.
Yotpo - Yotpo has a very clean user interface and design and offers easy-to-use customizations for your review requests. They integrate with Google and Facebook to amplify your customer feedback. However, their customers tend to be consumer-packaged goods companies and retail-distributed consumer brands.
CRM system - Some CRM systems offer review aggregation, so check with your vendor. These tools will be the most accurate in terms of customer status and depth of data and will help make it easy to send requests immediately when jobs are completed. However, they sometimes lack broad reach in amplifying your reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc. They also may or may not have a strong offering in their delivery method or user interfaces since this usually isn’t their core focus or competency.
GlassHouse - GlassHouse has a unique approach of offering both review aggregation and insights into customer behavior and history. Through using both the GlassHouse scoring engine and buyer online behavior, you can get intel on buyers before taking jobs. You can also review your clients before you request a review from them and ensure you're sending them a request for the review site they actually use (Yelp vs. Google, for instance). GlassHouse has review collection as part of a larger intel offering vs. being focused on customer communications, which means GlassHouse is more geared towards actionable decision-making vs. marketing.