It may not seem like much at first glance, but a review on the world’s top search engine can play an important role in influencing prospects when they’re exploring companies in your vertical. And consistently adding new reviews over time can be a proven way to increase your number of prospects, and ultimately your number of sales, all without any investment in terms of additional effort from your team or additional advertising dollars from your budget.
While using online user reviews in order to inform purchase decisions started as a trend in the business-to-consumer (B2C) space, the practice has become increasingly prevalent in the business-to-business (B2B) space as well in recent years. Of all the online marketplaces used by B2B buyers to inform purchase decisions, Google Reviews have emerged as one of the most important—because it not only builds your business’s online credibility but also enhances your search ranking, giving you a potential advantage over your competitors when potential prospects are first starting their buying journey.
In order to enhance their presence on Google, OnboardIT, an Arizona-based IT services firm, has been leveraging a key SmileBack feature. With a simple technical solution, they’re quickly and easily generating new Google reviews from their incoming positive customer feedback. We spoke with OnboardIT President Brandon Garrett about his company’s recent efforts.
“Google Reviews is the most important social evidence that people will use when searching for an MSP or validating our brand.”
Build on top of an established CSAT and NPS strategy
Growing your business through feedback needs a foundation. With an integrated and fully operationalized strategies around Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and/or Net Promoter Score (NPS) at your MSP, you have a ready-made springboard from which to drive online customer reviews.
For OnboardIT, customer satisfaction is a key piece of its differentiation strategy and a core focus of its business.
“Customer satisfaction is a crucial differentiator because it’s all the customer sees,” says Garrett. “Most of our work is behind the scenes and what really counts is what the user notices.”
The firm uses both CSAT and NPS to generate constant customer feedback and ensure they have their finger on the pulse of their client sentiment. They collect feedback actively and often in order to objectively measure the efficacy of their service experience and ensure the quality is always superior.
Leverage your feedback to generate Google Reviews
Because OnboardIT had already adopted both CSAT and NPS as feedback mechanisms, adding the Google Reviews capability was a piece of cake. All it took in order to activate the functionality was adding the company’s Google My Business listing to their existing surveys in the SmileBack application. The rest proved to simply be a natural extension of their existing client feedback process.
“We’ve learned that if you make it easy for people to leave a review, especially at the same time they are already leaving feedback, they’ll likely to adopt the process,” notes Garrett. “We’ve been able to drive additional Google reviews in a fairly short period of time.”
The way the SmileBack 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 OnboardIT’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.
Reap the rewards of your hard work
OnboardIT now has a solid collection of 5-star reviews displayed prominently against their name whenever a would-be prospect finds their way to their profile on Google. Many of the reviews even include callouts from the users around their positive attributes: highlighting their “professionalism” “quality” “responsiveness” and “value” as defining traits when prompted by Google.
“I think that review data is yet another confidence building point that drives people to choose us over the competitors,“ says Garrett. “We’ve noticed that customers tend to trust us the more evidence we build up around our brand.”
“As we focus more on SEO and inbound marketing,” continues Garrett, “it will certainly drive even more traffic.”
If you want to increase your business’ online presence, book a demo and speak with us already today!
