It’s a great question: How do you get reviews for a construction company? A great follow-up question: Why is that important? Customer reviews help create and shape your construction company’s online reputation. What your existing customers say about you — good or bad — is highly influential to potential customers searching online. Reviews provide important context and details that people need to make a decision about whether to work with you.
But in order to build up a large body of quality reviews, you need to do more than just hope your customers will leave reviews on their own. Proactively asking for reviews is a great way to engage your customers and encourage them to share their opinions and experiences that they may not otherwise do.
In our recent report, Maximizing Your Online Reputation, we analyzed businesses in six different industries. Here’s a discussion and best practices on how to get reviews for a construction company. We will discuss the impact and value of review requests, along with some practical advice you can put to use.
Review requests increase review volume
It turns out that when you ask customers for reviews, many will oblige — helping you generate more reviews faster. According to our data, construction companies that asked for reviews got 1.5X more reviews — an average of 66 reviews per location vs. 44 reviews per location when they did not ask for reviews.
Why does review volume matter? The short answer is that the more reviews you have — and the more recent the reviews are — the more visible your business will be in local search results and the more legitimate your business will seem to people searching online. Recent reviews from verified customers show that your business is alive and well, so to speak.
Plus, your Google rating is determined by averaging all your reviews to date — so if you have a lot of good reviews, this will be reflected in your rating. However, a word of caution about this that we’ll cover in the tips below.
Important tips:
- When you ask for a review, make sure you’re asking for honest feedback. Though it’s tempting to solicit only positive reviews because you know it’ll make your business look better, the reality is that many people see right through these attempts to game the system. A business with only 5-star reviews? Nah, something seems fishy.
- Instead, authentic feedback — even if it’s not rosy all the time — lends far more credibility to your business, which, in this age of online manipulation, is non-negotiable for people when they’re planning to hand over their money.
- Speaking of manipulation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently banned the creation and purchase of fake reviews as well as the practice of incentivizing customers to give sentiment-specific reviews — such as positive only. So this should give you further reason to strive for authenticity and transparency in customer reviews.
Review requests give you an NPS and ratings boost
Net Promoter Score measures how likely your customers are to recommend your business to others, on a scale of 0 (not likely at all) to 10 (highly likely). It’s a quick gauge to understand how satisfied and potentially loyal your customers are. Similarly, your star rating on Google is another way to get an at-a-glance idea of customer sentiment.
Our data showed that simply by requesting reviews you can influence both your NPS and rating. Construction companies that used GatherUp to request reviews had a higher average NPS than their industry peers — 82 vs. 50. (For those who are wondering, 82 is considered an excellent score.)
Furthermore, construction companies that specifically asked for third-party reviews — reviews given on independent or industry-specific review sites — had an average rating of 4.8, as opposed to an average rating of 4.6 for companies that didn’t ask for third-party reviews.
You can think of review requests as a drop in the pond that creates a ripple effect. First of all, your customers appreciate when you ask for their feedback, since a business that cares what its customers think is a business that is also willing to improve. This kind of engagement with your customers and your efforts to make necessary changes have a positive impact on customers’ perceptions of you. This is then reflected in better NPS scores and an influx of good reviews that have the added benefit of increasing your rating.
Important tips:
- Run an NPS survey to get your score. It can be as simple and easy as a one-question survey. You can do this at intervals throughout the customer journey so you can accumulate enough data to compare scores over time and get an accurate sense of overall customer satisfaction.
- Take the feedback you get from customer reviews and surveys seriously. What are you doing well? Keep doing more of that. What are you struggling with, or how are you falling behind the competition? Fix those issues and figure out how you need to evolve so you can create a better customer experience. Feedback in any form is immensely useful as it shines a spotlight on areas of your business that need attention or reinforcement.
A quick note about how to request reviews
There are many ways to ask customers for reviews. Two of the most popular methods today are email and SMS (short message service — otherwise known as texting).
Construction companies that only used email to request reviews generated an average of 46 reviews, and those that only used SMS generated an average of 59 reviews, according to our data. You can see that SMS has a slight edge over email, since sending and responding to texts is generally quicker, easier, and more convenient. However, when companies used a combined approach to request reviews — both email and SMS — they generated an average of 89 reviews.
If you want to kick your review process into high gear, consider using both email and SMS to reach your customers.
Bottom line: Review requests open the door to feedback that helps attract and convert new customers, enhances your online presence, and drives growth. However you choose to do it, make sure review requests are a key part of your overall reputation management strategy.
To learn how GatherUp’s reputation management platform can support your insurance business, request a consultation with one of our reputation experts today.
