Learn How to Get More Online Reviews for Your HVAC Business
By My Service Depot on Tuesday, September 8, 2020More positive reviews make your HVAC business look attractive to potential customers. Find out how to get them!
Customer reviews. Love them or hate them, they provide a lot of important information to new, potential customers. Companies with lots of good reviews will have a better chance to secure new business than a company that has few reviews or too many bad/mediocre reviews.
Even bad reviews can be helpful though, as they can point out issues with your process or with an employee who casts your business in a negative light. If a bad review identifies a real issue, you can take steps to fix it.
So, either way, more reviews add value. In this article, we’ll go over a few things you can do to help increase the amount of reviews you receive for your business.
Set up multiple review sites.
One easy thing to do? Set up for reviews on multiple platforms. If you offer customers multiple ways to leave a review, you have a greater chance of having them take action (since they likely already have an account on at least one platform where you need reviews). Some of the more popular review sites for HVAC businesses include Yelp, Google My Business, Angie’s List, Home Advisor, Facebook, and even the Better Business Bureau. Take steps to create or claim your profiles on each of these sites.
Send follow-ups to customers asking for reviews.
While you will always have some customers that will take the initiative and leave reviews of their own accord, you’ll usually have to ask your customers to leave feedback. If you use HVAC software like Smart Service, you may already have a powerful tool to assist with this. Smart Service (and some other HVAC software platforms) offers functionality that you can utilize to send out messages after completing a job. This commonly takes the form of a “thank you for your business” email. You can embed links to your review website(s) in such an email, making the reviews process easy for your customer.
If you do things in a less automated manner, you may want to gauge how happy your customer is before sending them to a reviews platform. You don’t want to send a review request to a customer who has an axe to grind.
Incentivize your customers.
One popular tactic used my many other companies is to give customers some concrete incentive to leave you a review. Offering a coupon, discount, or deal on an upsell (such as a service agreement plan) can help motivate customers to leave a review. If you have a social media presence, you can use these same incentives there to solicit reviews there.
Monitor the reviews you do receive, whether positive or negative.
As stated earlier, you should remain mindful of both positive and negative reviews. While no one likes getting or responding to negative reviews, doing so can help your company staunch the bleeding caused by scorned customers. In many cases, you can use your response to make things right with the customer. In cases where the customer is inconsolable, you can still assure them that you’ve listened to their issue, which might prevent them from spreading any further negativity.
Keep an eye on your all your review sites.
If you do have a presence on multiple reviews websites, you will want to make sure you monitor them all as best you can. Keeping an eye on one platform helps, but you could miss something on another.
Certain websites (like ReviewTrackers) can help you track such a thing. These sites collect data in one place so you can more efficiently manage your online reviews.
Conclusion
To summarize, you want to make sure you have a good amount of online reviews presence. More reviews means more credibility in the eyes of potential customers. Remember to make it easy to leave a review, consider offering an incentive for reviewers, and monitor all the reviews you do get. Many of your competitors already have a formal reviews system, so you need to come up with your own to avoid falling behind.
