Having Trouble Getting Reviews? Take a Look At Our Favorite Software

As a mar­ket­ing guy and life­long fan of tech­nol­o­gy, I’m always eval­u­at­ing soft­ware and apps that will make a com­pa­ny more effi­cient and not com­pli­cate the workflow. 

I’m often asked about how to make the process of col­lect­ing and gen­er­at­ing online reviews eas­i­er. Even the hap­pi­est of clients can be slow to fol­low through on leav­ing a review, or maybe they get stuck some­where in the process and lose interest. 

After a lot of exper­i­men­ta­tion, I have a soft­ware that I feel 100% com­fort­able rec­om­mend­ing. But first, here are a few quick tips to keep in mind.

3 Tips for Mak­ing Reviews Part of Your Workflow

And that’s half the bat­tle: it HAS to be part of your workflow:

1. Make a goal. You set lead count goals, so why not review goals? Talk about it with your team, give them own­er­ship over the process, and set clear goals with clear incen­tives (if possible). 
2. Make it part of your process. Don’t leave it to chance. Ask clients for a review and make it easy for them. This is where the right tech­nol­o­gy real­ly comes into play (more on that below).
3. Track it. See where your reviews are com­ing from, where the most are being shared, and which of your team mem­bers are mak­ing it happen. 

Podi­um: My Favorite Pro­gram for Rep­u­ta­tion Management 

I stum­bled across this pro­gram a num­ber of years ago, and liked it so much that I became a refer­ral part­ner and reseller in Decem­ber of 2020.

I must’ve been onto some­thing! Google recent­ly invest­ed heav­i­ly (and exclu­sive­ly) in Podi­um as a rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment soft­ware, clear­ly see­ing the same value.

Going Deep­er Than Rep­u­ta­tion Man­age­ment Alone

Podi­um is actu­al­ly a mes­sag­ing platform. 

Think Face­book Mes­sen­ger, only with far more fea­tures and more uni­ver­sal. It relies on text mes­sag­ing (SMS) prospects and clients, and then those replies come through the Podi­um mes­sag­ing dash­board mak­ing them easy to track and manage. 

Podi­um also inte­grates with Face­book Mes­sen­ger, Apple Mes­sen­ger, Google Busi­ness Mes­sages, and a few oth­ers, mean­ing that any of those chat streams you have going are all orga­nized and fun­neled through your Podi­um dash­board. No more chas­ing mes­sages, miss­ing replies, or dig­ging through old con­ver­sa­tions to find a spe­cif­ic client or prospect. 

You can also assign mes­sages to oth­er team mem­bers, let­ting the right peo­ple han­dle spe­cif­ic chats. 

Get More Reviews for Your Busi­ness with Podium

One of the key fea­tures that Podi­um offers, and one of the rea­sons why I start­ed using and rec­om­mend­ing it, is that they make it easy to get reviews. In fact, Podi­um says that the home ser­vices indus­try should be get­ting between 30% to 40% of their cus­tomers to leave reviews online using their plat­form. That’s the data they’ve seen when cus­tomers uti­lize their tool on a reg­u­lar basis!

How does it work?

1. You look up the customer’s name and/​or phone num­ber in the software
2. Click a tem­plate mes­sage (like ​“review us”) from a drop­down menu
3. Hit send

The cus­tomer will get the text mes­sage with a link to leave the review. The default set­ting sends them to Google Reviews, but you can set it up for Houzz, Face­book, etc.

Lead­er­ship Board

I am a huge fan of get­ting your tech­ni­cians (or crew) to help get more reviews. It’s a team effort! Podi­um said that they see the best results when a crew mem­ber in the field uses their soft­ware right when they fin­ish a job, and before they leave the prop­er­ty. This is where they see 30% to 40% of cus­tomers leav­ing a review.

Podi­um has a lead­er­ship board in their plat­form that allows admins to review who is send­ing links and get­ting the most reviews. You can use this infor­ma­tion per­haps as a fun con­test, or to man­age a bonus sys­tem (pay for performance).

I’m not going to dig too deeply into the oth­er fea­tures here — that’s con­tent for anoth­er post. But just as a quick recap, Podi­um also offers:

• Sur­veys & Feed­back (NPS score)
• Pay­ments (accept pay­ments via text)
• Cen­tral­ized inbox
• Team chat
• Pri­vate 1 on 1 chat
• Web chat
• Video chat
• SMS cam­paigns, and more

Podi­um is a soft­ware that your entire com­pa­ny will end up using, from the ini­tial engage­ment with a prospect to the sales team, crew, front office, and/​or billing staff. I just scratched the sur­face on what Podi­um is able to do, but I think it is some­thing worth explor­ing. I am hap­py to walk you through a demo and answer any ques­tions you might have about the product. 

Podi­um has allowed me to offer sev­er­al dif­fer­ent price points that are exclu­sive to A David Cre­ation, start­ing as low as $99/​month. Reach out to learn more about how Podi­um can help not only grow your online reviews but your entire cus­tomer experience!