Real results from real home service shops.

Why they needed more online reviews

The marketplace for plumbing and HVAC contractors has changed dramatically over the past decade. Gone are the days of getting business through Yellow Pages ads, direct mail postcards and refrigerator magnets. Shouting louder and more often than the other guys just doesn’t work anymore.

Enter the era of online posts, SEO, PPC, Yelp and online reviews.

Ben Franklin Plumbing understood that to compete in this noisy, transparent and crowded online marketplace, they needed more online reviews from their customers, and that meant making it super easy for customers to leave them. With review sites like Yelp, BBB, Google, Facebook, YP.com and Superpages, asking for and getting a review can be difficult.

How did they get 567 reviews?

“ “We struggled with how to get reviews on all these different places and then found ReviewBuzz, and it turned out to be a great fit because we are able to just provide our customers one path to review us on whatever site was best for them.”

“It’s so easy to deal with a customer. There’s one website and basically you say, ‘Listen, go here, review us,’ and they take it from there. They get dropped into the ReviewBuzz portal and it has different avenues: Facebook and Google and all those key review sites.”

Focus on the service provider

“ “It all starts with the technicians. Obviously, they’re the guys that are driving the business, handing out the cards for us and asking for reviews.”

At first, Nate’s frontline team didn’t fully understand what public reviews mean to a consumer and to the success of the business.

“We got the guys to get started with the ReviewBuzz card, and we put in the incentive program. That certainly bolstered the average sales from the guys.”

Inspire and incent

Nate needed to get his techs motivated and asking for reviews, so he turned to ReviewBuzz’s gamification features.

“As a consumer, we’re all very aware if our friend says, ‘Hey, you should buy this fishing rod. It’s really good,’ and what that means to us.”

“Yet some of the guys in our company don’t really use the computer, they don’t get online, they don’t do email. So for them to understand the comparison between word of mouth and reading it online, I tried to establish that basis there.”

“ “We relayed the ReviewBuzz concept in our morning meeting: ‘Review me, not the company. This is for me, and my boss is going to see it.’ Now they all have that on their iPads.”

What about negative reviews?

“Most of our reviews are positive, which we’re definitely happy about, and for those that are not so happy, we now have the opportunity to respond in public.”

“As consumers ourselves, we know that companies are not perfect. When I shop on Amazon, I look at the best reviews and some of the worst reviews and make a decision based on that.”

“Being able to respond gives our company the ability to make amends in a public way and say, ‘Hey, look, we dropped the ball here. We’re sorry. What can we do?’ Or it allows us to defend ourselves politely.”

“Beforehand, we wouldn’t have known where these people are posting. ReviewBuzz helps us keep an eye on that and respond accordingly, so the world can see that even when a call wasn’t a perfect 10, we followed up and handled it.”

The before: a dashboard and a link

Paff had already bought the promise of more reviews once. Setup was a dashboard, a walkthrough and an incentive tab, and then the platform got out of the way.

“ “They set up a dashboard, and they turned us loose and said, ‘Hey, your customers are going to get a link to a review.’ That was pretty much the extent of it.”

The outcome was flat: “We weren’t successful. It was very minimal.” When Paff moved to ReviewBuzz, the crew assumed they were getting the same thing again.

The difference: a process, not a link

Paff trains twice a week and huddles every morning. ReviewBuzz plugged into that rhythm instead of running behind it, with turnkey training content, TapTools the techs use for face-to-face review requests, and a scoreboard they check against each other.

“ “With other companies it’s just more about how many of these links we can send out. It’s more of a volume thing than an actual process to provide really good customer service.”

Asked whether getting more reviews brought in higher-quality leads, Nick didn’t hesitate: “Yes, without a doubt.”

“If you’re a company that has standards for high customer service, ReviewBuzz is going to provide you the best path to take care of your customers and recognize your team members.”