How to turn happy customers into CHEERLEADERS!? by Chris Haddad

A few weeks back, I got some work done on my car at a local dealership. In all honesty, I took my car to this particular dealership, because I’m the Mayor of it on Foursquare.  Even if I just needed an inspection, why not also use this as another check-in to continue securing my mayorship, right? So why is this important?

There was something very interesting about the bill that I received at the end of my service. Well, not the bill itself, but a postcard that had been stapled to the bill. A very simple postcard - a logo of the dealership, a picture of a VW Jetta, and a message from the Service Manager: “Thanks for your business. If you have a few minutes, please visit any of the sites below and leave a comment or review about us”.  Then there was a list of some shortened URLs that led directly to the dealership’s profile on various review sites like Yelp and Google Places.

There’s no reason for you to not being doing this with your customers.

Here are three quick tips for turning customers into cheerleaders for your business:

1 .  Ask for feedback and reviews - In some manner, you had to ask for the initial sale, so keep that up - explicitly ask your customer to go and leave a review. Like a call-to-action to get them to convert on your site, be direct and to the point.
 

2. Make it easy for people to get to your profile on the  review sites - 
 Provide short and easy to type URLs with your message asking for their review
. Every URL shortening service lets you create custom tags, or you could send them to a page on your site which links off to all the profiles you have
. This page could bewww.yourdomain.com/customer-reviews for example.

3. Be ready for any and all feedback - If you’re afraid that people will post something nasty, get in front of it. When you ask for their review, include the contact info for a real live person to handle anything less than absolute satisfaction, and make sure to state "call this person if you aren't happy". If something nasty is posted, try to follow up with the poster by using the customer records you have available, and see if there’s any way that you could make up for the bad experience.
     
To get you started, here are some common online review sites where customers are able to leave feedback about local businesses:

    •    Yelp
    •    Google Places
    •    Foursquare tips
    •    Facebook Places
    •    InsiderPages.com

And here’s some places that would be ideal for specific industries:
    •    Angie’s List
    •    Dealer Rater
    •    Hotels.com
    •    Expedia
    •    LinkedIn Recommendations