Everyone loves a good Holiday. Whether it’s celebrating your love of food or drink, or showering your friends and family (or pet) with love, it’s fun to take the time to reflect and publicly recognize the people or things that make your life better.
Customer marketing and advocacy professionals know this all too well and work hard to recognize and nurture their customers into advocates each and every day. One way customers can give back to the businesses and brands they love is through reviews.
Recognizing the significance of customer reviews, Reputation, a leading B2B software company that manages consumer feedback from acquisition to loyalty, took a bold step to create National Leave a Review Day (June 8th) in partnership with G2. We had the opportunity to chat with Cassie Sneed, Senior Manager of Customer Marketing at Reputation, about the inspiration behind this initiative and the impact of customer reviews on businesses. Let’s dive in!
Q: What is National Leave a Review Day and how did it come about?
Cassie: At Reputation, we live and breathe reviews, and all feedback really. We are a B2B software platform that works with consumer-facing organizations and are consistently encouraging the brands we work with to request reviews from their customers. As a customer marketer, it is my passion to help our customers in any way. So I thought, why not take the extra step beyond just asking our customers to request, and request on their behalf? We could create a day to excite all consumers to leave a review, and that’s just what we did. I submitted our application to the National Day Archives and made it official. June 8th is our fearless leader, Joe Fuca’s, birthday – what a way to celebrate!
This is our way of showing our customers that we drink our own champagne and practice what we preach. Not only will we help you get those reviews but we’re going to help you request those reviews and take a lot of the weight off your shoulders to help you get that. We’re going to ask our own customers for reviews too, of course!
Q: How did you work with your marketing and content team to bring this to life?
Cassie: We needed to think about this from two perspectives: how will we arm a business to participate, and how do we arm a consumer to participate? At Reputation, our customers mainly sit in three verticals: automotive, healthcare and property management. All three have very different consumers with a wide variety of needs, so we thought mainly about good in-store pieces they could put up on display to really encourage digital reviews. Then, looking at the consumer side, we want to give them tips for writing a good review. For example, just giving someone five stars without any comments or feedback is not as valuable to a business.
We really want to empower both audiences, so we created materials for social posting, email templates and a step-by-step guide to help them participate with confidence.
Q: We noticed that you’re working with G2 on this. What inspired the team up?
Cassie: Reputation is all about feedback and using it to improve the customer experience. We take this to heart for both our customers and ourselves. We “drink our own champagne” if you will. Now, review sources are a bit different from B2C and B2B. Our main review source is G2. We’ve been partners for quite some time now and so appreciate how our reviews generated from G2 have shaped us as a company.
We did a webinar together and quickly began bouncing ideas back and forth. There was this great mutual excitement between our organizations because it’s what we collectively do for our customers.
Q: Why are leaving reviews so important?
Cassie: So many reasons of course! They help businesses improve. The feedback helps companies ensure that they are delivering on what they are advertising and have promised. If there are gaps, the feedback can help you find, measure and close it.Oftentimes the feedback can drive product roadmap decisions. One of my favorite ways that reviews can help is by providing public recognition for employees who go above and beyond!
We often put a lot of focus on review volume and while it is important, you need to also be thinking about review recency. This is especially true for the B2B space, as technology is constantly changing and updating. If a prospect sees a great five star review left from a year ago, they may ask themselves, “How much has that product changed since then?” Consumers are way less likely to trust that review than a review that was left a week or month ago. Review recency is critical and also helps support the growth of small businesses. Recently responded to Google Reviews solidifies a business page’s Google Ranking, which helps them get found and ultimately, get chosen! Reviews foster a culture of feedback between a brand and its consumers – when done right, it leads to growth.
Q: What are your tips and tricks for B2B companies looking to drive reviews?
Cassie: Timing and consistency. I feel like so often people think “well, I don’t want to blast a review pop-up over and over again,” because people can tire of those messages quickly. Given the current fluidity in the job market, I think it’s important to still get that review request out there to the same consumers and brands, because their point of contact might be changing. They might have left a different company or are coming back to you as a new customer.
Remember, B2B tech products are constantly changing. It’s good to have consistent feedback coming in via reviews because as you see trends – positive or negative – you’ll want to filter that back to your product team to ensure your roadmap is in line with what your customers are looking for.
Also, don’t be afraid to put your company out there and cast a wider net of who you’re asking to submit reviews. No matter what though, you need to be prepared to act on your feedback.
Q: What advice do you have for building internal buy-in and articulating the importance of reviews to other teams across the business?
Cassie: The feedback you’re collecting is almost like free market research, right? You are gaining so much insight about your product that every single facet of the company can learn from.
Even at Reputation, our own marketing team analyzes and digests feedback from reviews to make sure that what we are advertising is actually being delivered on.
If there is a gap between what our users are saying and what we’re advertising, then we need to lean on our customer experience team to help us find and close the gap.
It’s easy for other teams to think that they have an accurate perception of what our products are doing and how customers are using them. But then your reviews serve as actual customer feedback that’s like taking a customer advisory board at scale and you can give your team high-level points on where they need to improve their product.
This valuable feedback may change things and make your product even better, reduce churn and increase sales. At the end of the day, reviews will help keep your company sustainable.
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Check out Reputation’s National Leave a Review Day site to learn more and download their promotional starter kit.
