We have spoken to a lot of auto repair shop owners and managers who have told us that they don’t like to bother their customers by asking for reviews. Is that feeling justified? Do consumers really dislike being asked for reviews?
The great news is that the fine folks at Moz have helped us get a lot more insight into what consumers think about being asked for reviews as part of their Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior Report. We covered in detail their findings about how consumers evaluate reviews and particularly how that affects repair shop owners in the blog last month.
This month we are going to highlight the results of some of the questions they asked 1,300 consumers in September about being asked to leave reviews.
Before we look at some of those questions, here’s an important word of warning. You should not be rewarding people for giving you reviews. This is unethical at best and could qualify as illegal.
They did ask the question in the survey and 40% of the consumers said they had businesses offer money, discounts, or gifts in exchange for writing a review. Please don’t do this or try to manipulate your reviews in any way. If consumers find out that you have even one “fake” review it will completely destroy your credibility.
Now, onto the questions…
Has a local business asked you directly for a review in the past 5 years?
61% of the consumers said that they had received at least one direct request for a review during the past five years. That means that 39% of consumers were not asked one single time by a local business for a review over the previous five years. That all adds up to a lot of missed opportunities.
If you have been asking your customers consistently for reviews than you likely have a leg up on your competitors. If you haven’t been asking for reviews you can start today and still likely be ahead of most of your competitors.
When asked by a business to leave a review, how often do you do so?
This chart shows why it’s worth your time and effort to ask for reviews. More than 50% of consumers will always or usually leave a review when asked to do so. An additional 34% will sometimes leave a review when asked to do so. The quick summary – when you ask your customers for a review, most of them will leave one for your shop.
How do you prefer to be asked for local business reviews?
Notably, this is a select all that apply. As you can see email is the preferred way, with in-person right behind it. Text comes in third at 29%.
This is one of those things where the better you know your customer, the better you can modify your approach to fit their preference. If you’ve been communicating with a customer the whole time via text then there is a high likelihood that they are going to be good with a text request for a review. The good news is that our Integrated Reviews portal allows you to request a review via email and/or text.
Why do you write local business reviews?
This is a really important question to highlight. As mentioned in the intro paragraph of this blog, many repair shop owners tell us they don’t like to ask for reviews because they don’t like to bother customers. However, as seen in the answer to this question, 73% of consumers said they write local business reviews “To let others know my experience.” It is important to them to guide others to good businesses and away from bad businesses.
If you have delivered great service to a customer and you ask them for a review, you are helping them fulfill their mission to let others know of a good quality business that they can trust. Consumers are not just writing a good review for you, they are writing a good review to help all the other vehicle owners in their community identify a great shop to take their vehicle to.
So if you’ve hesitated in the past or been resistant to ask your happy customers for reviews, I hope that seeing the results of that survey question will encourage you to start asking more consistently.
Our Integrated Reviews platform helps our customers get more online reviews. To learn how we can help do that for your auto repair shop, call us at 855-294-6397 or schedule a meeting with us at a time that’s convenient for you!