Welcome to the final installment of our Ultimate Black Friday Guide for Repair Shops. It’s been a long journey, and we’re closing it out with a brief on the final part of the process – feedback and reviews.
The RepairDesk Ultimate Black Friday Guide for Repair Shops
- Marketing
- Presentation
- Offerings
- Customer Service
- Delivery & Expectations
- Reviews & Feedback
When you make a sale, the process does not just end there. As a repair store, you want people to trust you and come back to you, while also gaining new customers. That’s why the feedback and review process is so important. It helps you grow even bigger, and tailor your business to what your customers are looking for.
Let’s go over some of the ways you can collect reviews and feedback, and use them to your advantage.
The importance of reviews
In the modern age, consumers rely on trusted reviews on practically everything. Food, TV shows, products, apps – you name it. If you want to get good business, you need to have good reviews. In fact, almost 90% of people only pay for items based on online reviews. Surprisingly, even negative reviews have shown to help sales out by making people aware of the product.
So there’s no doubt that reviews are really important. They help people gauge how good a product, service, or business is for their needs by providing them relevant information from other users. Sometimes, this can be the winning formula for businesses. Getting a good review score means getting more customers.
There are many platforms now that support a rating and reviews system to highlight important listings. Your first priority should be getting reviews on Google through your Google My Business listing. These will help make you stand out when anyone searches for you online, with a neat little sidebar showing reviews and more information. Other popular platforms with a rating system include Yelp, Bing Places, Facebook, and the Better Business Bureau (US only). As a growing repair shop, you should definitely list yourself on these platforms and start collecting reviews on them.
How to collect feedback
Now that we’ve established how necessary reviews are for businesses, it’s time to see how we can collect them. Reviews and general feedback is usually collected after a customer has engaged with your business. Once they purchase an item or service, you can collect a review from them. There are a number of ways to collect feedback, which we should go over in this section.
Drop into their mailbox
The easiest way for you to collect a review is to ask for it. As a repair shop, you’re going to note down the contact details for your customer. Whether it’s their phone number or email address, you can use it to let them know about their repairs and promote your business.
The best strategy would be to send your customer an email after they have done business with you. You can ask how their experience was, and lead it into a link taking them to your review page. Questions you can ask them should be framed along the following lines.
- How did they like the Black Friday deal that was offered to them?
- How was their shopping experience with you?
- Would they recommend your business to a friend or family member?
- In what ways can your business improve, according to them?
Customers like to feel important and letting them know their feedback is valuable adds to the customer experience. You can use your POS software to automatically send personalized emails and follow-up messages to these customers. Since you have plenty to do around the store on Black Friday, automating emails is the best way to go.
Guide them to a feedback section online
When a customer pays for something online, you should have a section dedicated to collecting feedback from them. This can be pretty free-form, from having a comments section on your website right at checkout, or providing a link to it when you email them their invoice. Having a space reserved for collecting reviews will add consistency to your branding, and ensure that you collect them from your audience.
The golden rule here is to make it as simple and easy as possible for them. If they have to jump through hoops, then they won’t give you the reviews that you need. Wherever you want your reviews to go, you must place clear and concise links. Usually, a button titled “Write a review” would be great. You can also have the option to leave reviews on multiple platforms, so customers can choose their preferred one. Just make sure you don’t clutter it up, or confuse them.
Offer rewards for their effort
Of course, nothing really comes for free. If you want your customers to be more willing to leave reviews, you need to incentivize them. Let them know how they can benefit from dropping a review or rating for your store, and motivate them. Think of it as rewarding a customer for their time, and securing a future sale at the same time.
Offering rewards for reviews often leaves a positive image of your business. Customers would be more willing to shop with you if they know that you’ll be rewarding them for things. However, you need to be careful that you don’t come off as buying your way into good reviews. That is highly unethical and leaves a bad mark on your reputation. We recommend offering small discounts or coupons that customers can use on their next purchase. You could also run a giveaway campaign for customers who have left reviews within a certain timeframe. This motivates more people to send a review your way and give you valuable feedback.
What to do with reviews and feedback
Collecting reviews and getting great feedback from customers really helps promote your business. However, don’t simply rely on getting feedback for feedback’s sake – make good use of it. There’s a lot you can do with the reviews that come in to really amp up your Black Friday sales.
Share reviews on social media
A popular strategy is to share positive reviews on social media to attract more customers. This helps with keeping your branding on-point, motivating customers to check you out that previously hadn’t. You can do this by taking a screenshot of your good reviews, and either posting them as-is or creating an attractive image out of it.
Many online tools like Canva or Photopea can help you design a really good post. You can then use these posts on your pages as a way to boost your social profile. Many apps like Instagram also allow text posts to be created, so you can create posts that way as well. Once these posts are up, customers can use them in the future as validity for your business’s authenticity and reputation. If they’re convinced, they’ll go for the same offers and deals, netting you more sales.
If you’re a cellphone repair store that wants to attract customers this Black Friday, you should check out our Black Friday Marketing Toolkit. It’s got a set of social media posts, designs for a flex standee, and a website banner that you can use. Best of all, it’s absolutely FREE. Hit the download link below and get access to it right now.
Tweak your offerings according to feedback
While getting positive feedback is a great thing online, you may run into instances where the reviews you got were not so good. In these cases, it’s best to look into the matter and work on improving things.
For starters, if a negative review comes in, don’t panic! Remember that 68% of consumers trust reviews of a business more when there is both positive and negative feedback. Some services like Google and Yelp don’t even allow you to remove negative reviews, so you may as well stick with them. The best course of action is to learn and understand why a customer was displeased, and work to fix the issue.
The negative feedback is actually a blessing in disguise since it lets you show how committed you are to your customer. If you’re able to tweak the offerings your customer was unhappy with and communicate to them in a positive manner, it can really help your business out. You may turn a once unhappy customer into a fiercely loyal one. Moreover, positive resolutions to negative feedback can also garner you new followers. Showing positive customer service in the face of such feedback will have long-lasting benefits for you, so be sure to work on it.
Final Words
And with that, our Ultimate Black Friday Guide for Repair Shops comes to a close. We’ve discussed many important things in this series, from how to leverage the digital space to what kind of deals to provide, and how to best tackle customer service. Be sure to check out our other articles in this series to get the complete low-down.
Black Friday is a major celebration of the year, and so many people do their shopping during this time. It’s also the best time for businesses to boost their sales and end the year strong. With the unfortunate COVID-19 pandemic plaguing the world, it’s best to stay safe and be careful. It also means that businesses will have to change how they operate to be in sync with today’s climate. To help repair shops out, we developed this guide, and hope that it proved helpful to you.
If you’d like to do some savings yourself, check out our Black Friday offer on the RepairDesk Retail Toolkit. You’ll be getting a bunch of great hardware and software in one convenient package, saving big this holiday season. It’s the perfect time to get it and start your repair journey.
If you’re looking for the best solution for all your repair store needs, consider signing up for RepairDesk. RepairDesk is an all-in-one repair shop management system that makes it easier for you to take care of everything at your repair shop. Create tickets, process invoices, collect customer signatures, order your inventory online, and book appointments right, all in one place. Sign up now for a free 14-day trial.
