A Great Reputation is No Accident
Your customers love you, but that's top secret. At least, this is the case for the vast majority of equipment dealers (and most of Main Street America, for that matter). After all, how will customers hear about your great customer service or the knowledge of the parts countermen and technicians? Word of mouth is great, but only travels so far, and for so long, good or bad (though studies repeatedly show that bad word of mouth travels farther and longer than good press). How will somebody brand new to the market or the area know about your customer service?
Your ads can talk about how great you are, but buyers in this day and age are looking for social proof. They want to hear from somebody unbiased—your other customers. This is why reviews are critical. But in the day and age of the internet, "review" is like an "R-word". I have yet to find a small business (other than a restaurant) that loves Yelp, because we all get excoriated on there. (Yelp filters most positive reviews because they assume most of them are biased). Take a look at your reviews. Run a Google search for "<your business name> reviews" and see what comes up. For a lot of dealers, there are fewer than 10 reviews online, even after combining all review sites (Google, Facebook, Yelp, and so forth).
How many customers have you served this year? How many customers have you served since the company opened its doors? For a lot of dealers, that number is in the thousands each year, and tens of thousands since opening. The 5-10 reviews hardly represent thousandths of a percent of the customer base, and therefore they hardly represent customer sentiment, good or bad. There are dealers near me that easily serve 15,000-20,000 customers per year, and they have about 10 reviews. What a missed opportunity!
Studies repeatedly show that 80-90% of customers go online to check out us and our products before buying. Even if they aren’t looking for reviews, every map and GPS tool offers them anyway. If someone looks up directions and sees a 1-star rating, do you think there’s a chance they may choose the next dealer at an equal driving distance? Further, Google likes businesses with lots of great reviews online. It will display reputable businesses before businesses with no rating or a poor rating. Any dealer interested in success and standing out should have a strategy to improve online reputation. This process is called "reputation management".
Before we talk about ways to gather reviews, it's important to note that reviews do at least three things for dealers: they are a glimpse into the overall consumer experience (positive or negative), they give us a brief glimpse at customer sentiment (individually and collectively), and they provide social proof for future business. These are all separate and important matters to the successful dealer, and they must not be confused. If we fire up an automation to gather reviews before we fine tune our customer service, we may end up with a ton of bad reviews left online. If you do not already have one, you also need a strategy for handling upset customers (spoiler: "firing" every angry customer is not a strategy).
Great customer service is not about equity or justice. It's about cultivating a relationship. Some relationships must be severed, if they are no longer productive or profitable. How many relationships (boyfriend/girlfriend, husband/wife) are 100% equitable and 100% fair to everybody all the time? Great relationships often have a give and take, and business relationships are even less equitable, at least to the successful dealer. However, having worked with dealer groups for many years, dealers are too quick to fire customers. We've been there too. It's easier to fire the customer than to eat crow or even pony up when the issue is a gray area. It's certainly easier to fire a customer than it is to fix a problem with myself or my staff. That doesn't make it the best option, though. If you find that a high percentage of transactions (more than, say, 4 or 5 out of 100), end up with a major customer service issue, there may be significant processes that need to be amended. There's often low-hanging fruit, like "they don't call me back", "they never got me my manual", or other easy stuff to fix. Implement a permanent fix to the process so these types of things don't turn into a bad online reputation. More importantly, take care of the customer! They are your best offline salesmen, and the little things matter.
Survey tools are a great way to capture a glimpse of customer sentiment and the general customer experience. These are not the same as review tools, though survey tools can ask the customer for reviews. Great survey tools ask the famous NPS question: "would you recommend us?", with a scale of 1-10. A 1-5 scale is still helpful here. Measuring NPS is a fantastic opportunity for dealers to make sure the customer experience is awesome, and every dealer should do this.
In the day and age of integrations, more and more NPS survey tools measure sentiment, and if it's favorable, offer the customer a link to a review site or two where they can give you high marks for all the world to see. If the sentiment is unfavorable, they give the customer an outlet to vent. This is HUGE! When we implemented an automated survey process, we found that people were satisfied to vent to this tool instead of venting with an online review. Dealers that do not use a survey tool often force the customer to leave a bad review to get their attention, or perhaps only in the customer's mind that is the case. Give them an outlet to reach management and they will GREATLY appreciate you for it. And some or most of these irate customers will be your next promoters!
In order to manage your online reputation, you first need to unify your directory listings online. There are numerous services that offer this, but one popular service is called "Yext". Yext gives you one portal to claim your directory listings and reconcile your contact information and hours. They also give you a single place to read your reviews and respond from within their portal. Be sure to respond with thanks to all positive reviews, and to the negative reviews, do not argue with them publicly! Take it offline with a simple "We're sorry to hear you had a bad experience. We will be calling you right away to make this right.", even if you know it is a customer who cannot be pleased. At this point, it's about what your next customer will see online, not about this one customer. Your future customers need to know you're committed to customer service.
One great but pricey survey tool is called "Birdeye", and Birdeye includes the Yext directory service with the subscription, surveys customers via SMS and email, though it does not utilize the NPS scale. There are hundreds of tools that do this, so you may find another that you like better.
Talk to your customers. Continuously improve your processes. Own the competition through amazing customer experiences. It will pay back in spades.