The importance of social proofing for businesses of all types is rapidly increasing. The trend started in the B2C space—with customers informing purchase decisions about hotels, restaurants and fashion retailers by browsing user reviews across websites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor and Amazon—but it has quickly moved in the B2B space as well. Now, businesses are consulting reviews by other businesses as part of their buyer journey—the companies getting ahead of this trend will reap the rewards.
One of the most important platforms for business-to-business reviews is Google. The significance when it comes to growing your company’s online presence is outsized compared to any other reviews marketplace because Google reviews not only build credibility and trust for your business but also increase your search ranking, making your business both more visible and more appealing to potential prospects.
Here at SmileBack, we recently built the technology to help our customers quickly and easily enhance their online presence through leveraging customer feedback to generate Google Reviews. We reached out to Big Sur Technologies of Tampa Bay, Florida in order to share some early insights from their experience after implementing this shiny new feature.
“Customer satisfaction is the most important driver of our business. Customer success is our success.”
First, differentiate your business with CSAT + NPS
Everything starts with customer satisfaction. In order to leverage feedback in order to drive your business’s online presence, you need to first integrate and operationalize Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and/or Net Promoter Score (NPS) throughout your organization. The more feedback you’re receiving and the higher the quality, the better your foundation for using it to market.
Big Sur Technologies is doing exactly that. A leader in the IT services space, Big Sur is helping simplify cybersecurity, cloud hosting, disaster recovery, infrastructure, and IT help desk solutions for small to medium-sized businesses throughout the southeastern United States.
“Customer satisfaction is the most important driver of our business,” says Logan Morello, a Client Partner at Big Sur. “Customer success is our success. A great customer experience helps deepen relationships and creates customer advocates which is the ultimate goal and differentiator for Big Sur.”
Second, activate the Google Reviews capability
From setting up CSAT and NPS surveys, adding the ability to gather Google Reviews is easy. Big Sur didn’t take long to go from becoming a SmileBack customer to collecting feedback to leveraging it to promote their business. All they had to do was add their Google My Business listing to their existing surveys in the SmileBack application.
“Giving our customer advocates an opportunity to share how great Big Sur is, even before we get a chance to engage with them directly, can be the difference between stagnation and growth,” says Morello. “We prefer the latter.”
Through using SmileBack, Big Sur’s customer advocates effectively self-select. The way the Google Reviews feature works is simple: when activated, any end-user who leaves a “positive” CSAT review (the green smiley face!) or a “promoter” NPS response (a score of 9 or 10!) and a comment is prompted to post that same comment on Big Sur’s Google My Business page with a simple checkbox. Once they hit submit, they’re taken straight to the Google listing where all they have to do is hit paste.
“Our brand slogan is “Making IT Easy” and so, the simplicity of the Google reviews feature is on brand,” continues Morello. “Our goal is to make it as frictionless as possible. We realize that although a customer advocate is willing to share their success story, they have busy lives and their opportunities to do so are limited. The Google reviews feature helps solve that.”
Third, watch your business’s online presence grow
These reviews can be a critical proof-point in a company’s top-of-funnel marketing efforts. Your Google My Business listing may be one of your prospective customer’s first touch-points with your brand—having glowing testimonials from existing clients front-and-centre provides a sense of instant trust and credibility for your business.
“Google is the competitive battlefield when it comes to digital presence and overall brand perception these days,” says Morello. “For potential clients, it’s the first impression and arguably the most important piece of a customer’s journey.”
While Big Sur only recently implemented the Google Reviews tool, they know a consistent effort and focus on customer satisfaction will lead to more and more reviews and that will, in turn, lead to more top-of-the-funnel conversions. And all this is purely on organic—companies don’t need to spend a single additional dollar on acquisition in order to get results.
“This will certainly impact the coming relaunch of our website and overall marketing strategy to drive growth,” notes Morello. “I like to call it the Amazonification of us all, where consumer buying habits bleed into business-to business buying habits.”
“If you think about it, when is the last time you bought a product or service without
Logan Morello, Client Partner at Big Sur Technologies
reading the reviews?”
If want to take the next step in growing your business, book a demo and speak with us today! We are ready whenever you are 🙂
