If you are working in one of the thousands of moving companies in the USA you might probably be wondering how to impress your customers. The fight for the customer and its business is getting harder and harder.
According to several surveys, between 75 and 80 percent of consumers read reviews before making a buying decision and just a tiny percent of people are willing to go with a one star or a two star company. Over time people have more choices and richer data to get informed from, so researching a company’s reputation has become a common thing in the internet era.
Since 2009 reviews are a ranking factor in the Google search results. Reviews and reputation impact local results and some speculate that they impact the overall Google website rankings as well.
This all means that improving and developing a better online (and offline) reputation could greatly influence a business’s bottom line.
Acquiring more local citations will also help in the local optimization for the search engines to attract more clicks.
In this post, I will provide some tips for moving companies on how to utilize the power of reviews and drive positive feedback while improving the overall quality of service.
Reputation management for moving companies
So can you improve your online reputation? How to attract the great moving reviews and make use of them at your best. Here is a basic guide made to improve your online reputation.
How do I get people to post? What if by the end of the year you have over 200 reviews for your brand online and how you have only 10? Ask yourself these questions first:
How many moves do you perform per month
Let’s say your company does about 100 moves a month. That means that during the course of a full year, you serve about 12000 people who pay you for moving services. Even if you got 10% to post a review, that is 120 reviews. That is how easy it can be.
Of course, the following guide can be used in many different businesses that serve customers different from the moving industry – for example cleaning companies, auto transportation companies or repair shops.
- First, start by examining the current review sites and local business directories that mention your brand. Make a list of all the sites that mention your brand and allow customers to write reviews and testimonials. This will be your starting point.
- Explore other social/review sites and business listing websites that do not feature your brand. This could be a great place to attract more customers. Register your company and claim your profile so you can manage your brand there. This could also be a great place to advertise.
- Monitoring existing reviews and customer feedback is also a good way to see how your staff is doing across many or a few business locations.
How to attract great moving reviews and enhance your service
- Speak with your salesmen. They communicate with the customers on a regular basis. Ask them about the complaints they are getting from the customers and think how they can be improved.
- Offering your current customers a printed card with instructions on how to leave a review could get you even more reviews faster.
- Ask the salesmen to make a list of all the satisfied customers in the past month with names, phones, and email addresses.
- Make your salesmen call them to see if everything is going great with them. Shoot them an email, call them. Let them know you care. Making a verbal request is a perfectly legitimate way to encourage customers to leave feedback.
- After making sure that everything is OK with your customers, send them an email. Ask them to share their experience. Provide them with an easy link to the websites you want them to leave their feedback. Make it easy for them to share their experience.
- Monitor the review websites and make sure all your customers have left their feedback online. If some of them haven’t written about their experience, it is a good idea to call them again and send them another email just in case. At RemovalReviews we’ve created a FAQ page for those who want to manage their online reputation on our site.
- Read the reviews. You will learn a lot from your customers’ feedback. Understanding your pros will help you in your marketing efforts. See why your customers like your service and list the best features in your website – make them obvious.
This will help you get great moving reviews and comments from your customers. Take some of these reviews and create a testimonials page on your website. Do not write reviews on your own company. It is against the rules of most websites and it is also easily detectable by your customers.
How to reduce the bad moving reviews
Of course, there will be always some unhappy customers. Especially if you execute a lot of moves per month, having some bad reviews is common. Here are some basic tips how to handle these situations:
- Read the negative reviews on your business. See your customers’ complaints. Write down all the negative experiences essential points.
- Make sure you work on making sure you prevent those bad experiences from happening to your customers again in the future. This will help you build a stronger brand.
- You need to build a strategy to enhance your reputation. Make a list of all the unhappy customers and their issues. Look them up in your files. Get familiar with their particular cases.
- Share your side of the story – reply to the customer reviews. Most review websites will give you the option to respond to reviews publicly. At RemovalReviews every registered moving company can respond to customer reviews with their free accounts and even edit or delete their responses afterward. Address all feedback. It might seem natural to address only the negative reviews, but business owners should respond to all ratings and reviews whether positive or negative. This makes an excellent impact on all future prospects reading those reviews. As long as the majority of reviews are not negative, most people will value the business’ professional approach, care, and responsiveness. This is also a signal of strong and reliable customer support and future customers are more likely to use companies that provide great support.
- Contact every one of those unhappy customers and speak with them. See how you can work things out with them. Let them know you care and you want to make it up with them. Most people will appreciate the time to connect with them to work things out.
- After making sure your customers are happy you can ask them to remove their bad reviews or edit them with their up to date experiences.
- Provide a way for customers to complain right at your moving company’s website. Even with the best service-oriented businesses, people can have less-than-ideal experiences and sometimes people just need to vent, so give them a place to communicate with you away from the public eye. Closely monitor your on-site complaints and respond immediately.
Getting in touch with those people will help you enhance your moving service and become a proffered choice.
How to build a stronger moving company brand
Connecting with customers is essential when building a strong company brand. The common social networks like Facebook and Twitter offer the unique opportunity for your business to increase the fan base and connect with customers while serving them. Teach your staff how to do it.
If you try to reach all your current customers online you will have the opportunity to keep that relationship even after the moving job is done. That will help you make them consider to share their best experiences online.
You can also create a testimonials page on your website. Featuring customers’ feedback that shows the quality of work will help you build confidence in your prospects and this could naturally lead to more customers overall.
Here are some more marketing ideas for moving companies you might want to check out to boost your business. Here are some of the top twitter accounts to follow in the moving industry.You may also want to book more moving jobs. In that case, see what kind of moving leads can we offer you here and also check our article about how to utilize moving leads for your advantage.
I hope we covered some interesting points how to improve your reputation in the short term and how to improve your moving services in the long term.
Do you know a better approach? Do you know other ways to achieve better brand reputation online? Share your thoughts in the comments below.