How do you get more reviews for your storage and transportation business? In the storage and transportation industry, competition can be fierce. You may offer many of the same products and services as your competitors, which means you’re often competing on price alone. To stand out more fully from your competitors, you need to ensure a strong online reputation. Managing your reputation effectively can make the difference between whether prospective customers choose to do business with you — or not.
One area to pay particular attention to is customer reviews. The opinions and experiences of your customers provide the authentic social proof that prospective customers are looking for, answering questions about your business’s legitimacy, track record, and quality. And when you build up a large body of reviews, you can garner the positive attention and earn the conversions you need to gain a competitive advantage.
In our recent data report, we explored how specifically requesting reviews from customers can make a measurable difference for businesses in six different industries. Here are two important takeaways for storage and transportation businesses that want to implement or ramp up a review strategy.
1. Higher review volume
Plainly stated, if you want to generate more reviews, all you have to do is ask. Storage and transportation businesses got 3X more reviews when they asked their customers for them — an average of 234 per location vs. 83 per location when they didn’t ask.
Asking for reviews also impacts both first-party and third-party reviews. Our data showed that requesting reviews yielded an average of 140 first-party and 94 third-party reviews per location, while not requesting reviews only resulted in 29 first-party and 53 third-party reviews per location.
As a quick reminder, first-party reviews are given directly to you by your customers, such as on your company website, while third-party reviews are given by your customers on industry-specific or independent review sites — as well as search engines like Google.
So if you want to increase your review volume, the first place to start is by creating a process for continually asking customers for reviews.
And remember that you want honest feedback, even if it’s not always great. Not only does honest feedback shed light on real issues you need to address, getting an occasional negative review is also pretty common — since no business can please everyone 100% of the time. It’s how you handle the criticism and what you take away from it that matters most.
2. Better NPS and ratings
Requesting reviews earns you a better Net Promoter Score (NPS) and ratings. Storage and transportation businesses that used GatherUp to send review requests had an average NPS of 54, as compared to the average NPS of 38 for the industry. And when those same businesses asked for third-party reviews, their average star rating was 4.4, as compared to 4.2 when they didn’t ask for third-party reviews.
Why do NPS and ratings matter so much?
NPS is a customer satisfaction metric that measures how likely your customers are to recommend your business to others, using a scale of 0 (not likely at all) to 10 (very likely). Your star rating — what you see associated with your business in Google search results — is an average of all your customer reviews to date. Both are important indicators of customer sentiment that show you how well you’re doing in the eyes of your customers and if you have room for improvement.
By simply asking for reviews, you’re sending a message to your customers that you take their feedback seriously and you’re willing to make necessary changes to improve their experience. The perception that you care goes a long way with your current customers, motivating them to give you a better NPS, become promoters of your business, and leave positive reviews that impact your ratings.
The result is that more recommendations and better ratings help give prospective customers greater confidence in choosing to do business with you over the competition.
More tips for managing your online reputation effectively
As we’ve shown, review requests are a critical aspect of online reputation management, but there are other steps you can take as well to enhance your business image and showcase your strengths.
In addition to requesting reviews:
- Know what’s being said about you. Monitor review sites, Google, and social media for feedback about your business, then listen and take notes.
- Respond to feedback. Ignoring your customer reviews does nothing but give a bad impression. Instead, respond to every review you get — whether positive, negative, or neutral — to nurture customer relationships and deepen customer loyalty.
- Bring efficiency to your response process. Review responses can feel like just one more thing to add to your plate. With AI-generated review responses, you can save time and reduce the creative burden while ensuring personalized, relevant responses your customers will appreciate.
- Strive for continual improvement. Use the feedback you get to make changes that will improve the customer experience — which will help attract and retain more customers over the long term.
To learn how GatherUp’s reputation management platform can support your insurance business, request a consultation with one of our reputation experts today.
