The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Use Reviews To Get Customers To Do Your Marketing For You

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

Frederik Hermann is the Sr. Director of Marketing & Growth at BirdEye, an online reputation management system that helps businesses utilize the power of online reviews to attract new customers. He works with external agencies, develops data-driven growth marketing initiatives, supervises product development and brand building, and provides complex business analyses.  Harry Hawk is BirdEye’s Digital Advertising Manager. He has extensive experience in helping clients who are into robotics, marketing technology, logistics, retail, baking, accounting and event marketing grow and connect with their customers. In this episode, we talked about relationship marketing (paid social), online reputation, coaching...

These online reviews are pretty much as weighted as highly as a personal recommendation. So if you are evaluating a home service contractor, somebody to repair your HVAC, then yeah, you're looking at those online reviews. And like you said, some of them have reviews, but it's also about keeping them going. The recency of reviews, just having 100 or 200 reviews that were of a good rating from two years ago is not going to cut it. You want to make sure that you represent

a true representation of your business online by maybe automating the process and keeping those reviews coming. That's the only way on how you can maintain that online reputation. And it's important to respond as well. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service

millionaire, Tommy Mello. All right, so I got Frederick Herman here and Harry Hawk. These guys are killing it over at BirdEye. BirdEye, as you guys have probably heard me talk about on the podcast, has helped literally compound my reputation online. It's ridiculously amazing. I went from getting 100 reviews a month on a good day, and that's me paying my guys to ask customers, to 600, 700 a month and all over the place. Now I'm getting them on the BBB. I'm getting them all over Google, Yelp, you name it. They're coming through on a daily basis. But the coolest thing is BirdEye helps me monitor them.

And I've used lots and lots of different softwares for this. And this one by far, as far as tracking, knowing what's working. I get a text message every time I get a one-star. I get an email. I get to kind of inspect what I expect. Listen, guys, I really appreciate you coming on today. I wanted to just dive in, hear a little bit about you first, Frederick.

Hey there, Tommy. Pleasure to be on the podcast, and thanks for having us. I'm here at BirdEye Leading Marketing with about 20 years experience in leading marketing teams, mainly in the tech sector. And I mean, feedback has always been super crucial for any kind of company. If it's a tech company or home services or hospitality, it all comes down to feedback and reviews. And marketing has changed and we are leveraging that here at BirdEye and super excited to be part of the team now. Harry has been here a little bit longer and I'll pass it on to him.

Hi, Tommy. Hey, Harry. So again, super pumped to be here. It's so exciting. I've worked in small businesses. I've also worked on Wall Street in advertising. And I know what it's like to get that negative review that comes in. And it's like, what do you do? But it can't be a landmine. It's not,

right? There's a process like anything else that we face. And what I've learned over the years, I really work on leveraging existing customers in many different ways to find new customers. And it just, like you said, you monitor, you respond, you focus, and it's just amazing. With not so much effort, but a little bit of focus, we're really able to accomplish an awful lot, helping businesses grow. Yeah, you know, I learned about BirdEye just really seeing a lot on social media. Then when I found out you guys integrated into ServiceTitan, it was really a powerful thing for me.

And like I said, I've used these before, but when I saw how much it impacts us, I'm looking to start doing a lot more acquisitions. And the one thing I see is a lot of these companies, they don't get the reviews and they've got enough customers over the last decade. And I just think it's huge because I have 700 on one account, 1,000 on another, 500, crazy amounts. How important is it to have a great online reputation? So I think online reputation is now more crucial and important than ever. I mean,

the medium has democratized, meaning everybody can have a voice on the internet. May it be on social media or any sort of platform where people leave reviews. Like you already mentioned, BBB, Yelp, Google, Facebook. And there are hundreds of platforms where people can leave review for any sort of business. And not only your reputation is on the line, but pretty much the success of your business oftentimes relies upon those reviews, especially

if people don't know you and do their research online. These online reviews are pretty much as weighted as highly as a personal recommendation. So if you are evaluating a home service contractor, somebody to repair your HVAC, then yeah, you're looking at those online reviews. And like you said, some of them have reviews, but it's also about keeping them going. The recency of reviews, just having 100 or 200 reviews

that were of a good rating from two years ago is not going to cut it. You want to make sure that you represent a true representation of your business online by maybe automating the process and keeping those reviews coming. That's the only way on how you can maintain that online reputation. And it's important to respond as well. Yeah, I mean, now Google's really paying attention. It's called user-generated content. And I think it's so important to, I'd say, there's defense and there's offense. Defense is having somebody respond to those reviews in a timely manner.

Sometimes it's having someone call. They call it the happy call when we actually call the customer and make sure they're happy before they go online. But the offense is let's spread the good word and let's get you a platform to make it easy for you. Explain to me kind of how BirdEye works, kind of the process in which the tool

does what it needs to do to really amplify your reputation. Tommy, I think just to step back real quick, you talked about offense and defense. I think it's just critical. We all work in teams. You have teams of crews that are out there in that happy call. You want to make sure that everyone's happy. And if you're not asking that several different ways through several different channels of communication, you're not really going to get an answer. And so first and foremost, I think everybody's dealt with a large

company, whether it's their cable company or a national car leasing company. And after every contact, they send some kind of message. How did we do? And why should a smaller business, a local business, not have that opportunity to find out how everybody's doing? It's great to take the phone call. It's great to have your crew ask them. We would encourage that, not to stop that. But what we find is when people get asked by email and by text message,

they're more likely to respond. And essentially, the core of BirdEye is, you've talked about the integrations with products like Service Titan. After the service is completed or a critical part of the service, you can imagine certain contractors, there's sort of a setup or, you know, waiting for inspection after inspection. You can trigger these at any point and you ask how they did and you ask essentially to leave a review. And that's what BirdEye does in a nutshell. Okay. So, you know, I can't even tell you, I mean, you guys have probably dozens of competitors and I don't need to name the competitors, but what are some of the things that you guys are doing to stay out of the curve, make sure some of the integrations and seamless things to make it easier? I'll turn it over to Frederick, but I just want to say we have over a thousand integrations from many different fields, but I'll let Frederick address that. I mean, first and foremost,

we are the leading company in this online reputation, customer experience management space. As you can see on G2 Crowd and many other platforms that actually review and rate software, we are more set up as a platform that provides you the entire solution in one single dashboard with a very broad scope that allows you to manage all aspects of whatever touches online your reputation. That goes from listings to managing your online reviews,

aggregating them all in one dashboard, being able to respond to them, automating the process of getting new reviews, using your reviews as marketing material for yourself, automatically posting them to social media, integrating them on your own website. And then it goes further into deeper analytics and allowing you to maybe compare yourself to competitors and competitive benchmarking, insights that tie into that, managing all your listings online, making sure that the information online about you is consistent, web chat, being able for somebody on your website to be able to easily message you. Our mobile app is an important part, especially

if you are out and about and on the road. And you can get most of the functionality of the web dashboard within our mobile app for iOS and Android. And respond to reviews while you're out. You can request new reviews

and manage a lot of that from the mobile app as well. It's kind of like the comprehensiveness, the quality, our history within this segment, over seven-year-old company, biggest company in the space, lots of experience and over a thousand integrations, I think what easily sets us apart and makes us the number one in this field. Yeah, just thinking about investing in the future. I know Google Guarantee came out about two years ago. There's certain things that are important to what's happening this day and age.

I remember not that long ago, people didn't think a website was important. You still hear people say, well, I don't take customer feedback. They're never happy when I give them my price. But those aren't companies that are built to last. What I love so much about BirdEye and a tool like BirdEye, and there's certain things that I use for accounting or for payroll. But you guys do reputation management. So it's not like I just use service time because service time doesn't have the ability to do a very comprehensive accounting or reputation management. So I love the automation. You know,

some people are going, I don't have the time to do this. My answer for them would be, you don't have to do much. You just, you build it, you get with your team, you make sure everything looks right. And I say your team is in BirdEye and you set it and forget it, don't you? A lot. A lot of it goes that way. And let's be really clear for someone who's maybe hasn't used BirdEye, you setting up those auto requests. So when a job is indicated as being complete, let's say that's when you want to send out that request, it just goes out. So that's completely automated.

But you can also automate responses. And that doesn't mean that you don't ever manually get involved, but it means when you're busy checking on job sites, trying to get supplies brought over, working with crew, change, juggling, all of that stuff, you don't have to instantly stop everything because you got a one-star review or a five-star review or a four-star review. And we want to make it clear, you need to respond to all of these. You don't just respond to the negative ones. You don't just respond to the positive ones. So all of that can be automated. And then like anything else in life, you can go in and further contact somebody if you wish to. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's one of the

things that I think even in 2000, when Yelp just was, I remember the girl, actually, she's my buddy's wife now, got a job at Yelp and they were just a small small company and he said hey he said thanks for fixing my garage i'll leave you a review on this new site it's yelp my girlfriend's working there and he was still on there the work first one to review but then google started calculating yelp and their algorithm so when you look on searches you look google has their own first which is usually the three-pack after the pay-per-click, and then they've got the guarantee at the top. And then they have the organic, well, Yelp ranks.

It's just super important because all these reviews help your listing show up too when you've got a location, which is the Google My Business page. So the culmination of all of it working together is huge. And today, you know, someone can go into that Google My Business, into the map, you know, find a roofer near me, find a contractor near me,

a handyman near me, whatever it is that they're looking for, and they can filter it by stars if they want. If they want the best of the best, that's what they're going to find. Yeah, and you know, if I'm going to buy a business, typically I want them to have pretty good online reviews. I mean, if you're going to find. Yeah. And you know, if I'm going to buy a business, typically I want them to have pretty good online reviews.

I mean, if you're going to build, one of the things I've been talking about on the podcast is even if you're not going to sell your business this month or this year or in the next two, three years, you should build something that's sellable. And with that in mind, you need tools like this because without a tool like BirdEye, it's kind of the unfair advantage. And I'm so impressed with what you guys have done to our reputation that I wanted to have you guys on the podcast. So this is huge.

The listeners out here get to understand that it's a system that talks to my CRM. BirdEye itself is not a CRM. It's not made to handle every relationship. You're not going to do invoices. And that's what I use service time for. But you guys, you have over 1,000 integrations. And it handles that feedback to get on all those third-party sites. And it just keeps going.

I mean, we're getting them now on Nextdoor and other places like Facebook. And all these sites are starting to matter because it's such a huge population. Different people, some people are obsessed with social media. Some people are obsessed with their local neighborhood like Nextdoor. Some people are obsessed, they love Yelp. And they've always been on Yelp. They've got user interfaces that they're just used to and they love. And, you know, what's the biggest challenges that businesses face when it comes to getting

feedback from their customers these days? To your earlier point, I just wanted to add that you mentioned two important topics. One is obviously SEO, very important for any business nowadays because people often start their evaluation with an online search. And like you said, it's the top three search results there. If you have a, I don't know, below three-star overall rating, you will never show up in those top search results. So having recent reviews, having a good online reputation kind of immediately leads to new business as well. If you get into those top three spots,

that is where you will be the chosen business. And I mean, I do it all the time. And then you mentioned as well that it's kind of like the business near me or the roofer near me, which ties into voice search. The smart speakers become more and more popular or even using Siri or any other voice assistant on your phone. So the searches become simpler and you want to be able to rank for that. So SEO is important. Your website is important. Your online reputation ties into that and allows you to be found and chosen.

Back to your question, you were asking about the struggles that businesses might have with their online reputation today. Yeah. I mean, like you said, there are so many different platforms from Nextdoor to BBB to Yelp to Google My Business. And Google, like you said, is kind of like the king because it does directly tie into your search results and usually has the most amount of weight and traction in this field. But it's hard if you don't have any software solution in place to monitor them all at once.

If you have reviews in 15 different places, you might not even know immediately that you have a negative review on Nextdoor or on Facebook or on Yelp or on BBB. And solutions like ours, they bring it all back into one single dashboard, aggregate all your reviews from all the different sites, and allow you to respond to them either from the website or from the mobile app. And yeah, it's important to respond to those negative reviews.

Sometimes it might feel unfair of what is being said there. And it's really important to take to those negative reviews. Sometimes it might feel unfair of what is being said there. And it's really important to take a deep breath and analyze the situation, come up with a positive and understanding answer and addressing that problem. Yeah. I want to talk, Tommy, I heard you speak with your podcast with Tommy Griffith, and you were talking about getting feedback from customers directly, asking your crew to ask. You talked about the follow-up happy call. And there's obviously nothing wrong with asking someone directly, hey, how did I do? And just a personal story, I used to run a few restaurants. And if I went to a table, I had to ask three times before I actually got

any meaningful feedback. Some people will tell you straight out, but a lot of people, they think it's just a formality. Maybe they don't really want to insult you, that kind of thing. They don't want to say it to your face. So I would never discourage anyone from getting that direct feedback every time that we can. And you should still continue to encourage all of your crews, all of your staff to do that. But the reality is, again, as I mentioned earlier, getting that question asked in a text message or in an email together is really important.

One, we know that people react differently, speak differently online. You might be really polite in person. That same person may be a little bit more aggressive online. And of course, that's maybe why we see some negative online reviews, but people are more willing to tell you how they feel. And we don't want to shy away from that. If we're not getting feedback, we can't make the business better. We can't coach our teams better. And I think, you know, so two things are really what helps or hurts a business rather manage their online reputation.

They're not asking everybody for that feedback, and then they're not acting on it. They're not following up, making a change, making it right with a customer. And it may be certain products in this field, you don't really have a lot of repeat business. Like a restaurant might get the same customer a couple of times a month, but still you want to get the absolutely best feedback from them. And it just, it multiplies.

And you must've seen this in your own business. When you fix a problem, you stop getting that kind of negative feedback because more and more people are happy. And the more people are happy, the more customers you get. I mean, it's completely a virtuous cycle. Yeah, I think what's really powerful too, and I've said this before on the podcast, but it means a lot to have the technician that's the last one that's face-to-face with the customer asking them.

Because generally, people don't feel inclined to leave a review as much for the company as they do for the human being that they've met. So metaphorically, I'd rather leave one, a business, although there's probably owners behind it, I didn't get to meet the owners. So I want to leave it for the human being that I built a relationship with. So getting the technician to ask, hey, you're going to get a text message, it's very, very powerful. And then the other thing I say is you should always be mentioning we expect to give you five out of five service from the first call to the dispatch call to the technician. Did you receive five out of five service to the happy call? Five out of five is because Google's on five. Facebook's on five. Yelp's on five.

All these places, they typically review on one to five stars or thumbs up or whatever. So I think those two things are something that a lot of companies miss. But even if you get a negative review, sometimes it can be an opportunity for you to get in touch with that customer, understand what the problem is, fix the issue. And I'm sure you have seen that in your business as well. I certainly have in my time where you have a customer who's very angry because something went wrong.

You address it, you help them solve it, and they become an ambassador or advocate of you and refer even more business to you because you went the extra out of your way to solve for that problem and made them happy. And I certainly have seen it over and over again, that it's so important to really address the issues and respond. And then others can see that too. I agree. I can talk a lot about the reputation management because it really does. There's something called the net promoter score. And the net promoter score has to do with, if I was to call your customers, how likely would they be to say you did a great job? That's nine or 10. An even number is seven or eight. Anything below that is a bad net promoter score. Well,

this tool helps increase the net promoter score. Everybody needs to think about selling their business because at one point you're going to sell to your son or daughter or to another company, or the government's going to take it because you're not paying your taxes. But whatever, you should view it as something you're going to sell, and you've got to start thinking of what do people see. For me, I think they see me. I'm the owner of the business. So they definitely look at it and say, wow. And there's a lot of negativity here. And I make sure my technicians understand that you are a reflection of me when people are not happy. Look, it's hard

to please every single person, but we've got a whole team dedicated to make sure that we go back and try to figure out where that mistake was met. You guys didn't call us. You didn't notify us that you were going to be late. Okay. That's an internal problem like you guys mentioned earlier that we could fix. It's going to make the next hundred customers happier. So using these as opportunities for learning is one thing, but I just love the dashboard.

I love being able to log in and see these key performance indicators. And what I love is a lot of the stuff you guys do could tie back all the way to the technician. Now, I know that works through service tagging, but what's so beautiful about that is I can start going, oh my gosh, this guy is absolutely killing it. And then I can study what he does and try to endorse that behavior in the rest of my technicians. You know what I mean? Tommy, 100%. I just wrote a whole ebook for one of our teams about this. Too many people, we all need to coach. We need to coach our teams. Too many people think the number one thing is the negative thing that you're trying to get rid of. And obviously that's important. But when you have

a player who's making a good play and knows how to make that play, you can get everybody making that play. Be like this person. That's where the value comes because that's something that you know that works and you just get everybody working on that. Yeah. One of the things I do is you've heard the statement you praise in public and criticize in private. At my meetings meetings we have a morning mojo called monday tuesday wednesday friday and then on thursday the whole entire company all the technicians in every single state and market we're in jump on a zoom call and we discuss what went well what's working and i love for them there's an old expression it's about the bible says, until you've read the Bible and you understand the Bible, don't criticize the Bible or other books that you've read that criticize the Bible because

you never heard the truth yet. Well, I tend to try to teach, look, learn this way, learn this process, and then get people to become my disciples, if you will, that just, they go out there and they endorse everything we're doing. And a lot of that has to do with the biggest fallacy in service or home service businesses, you can't charge a lot of money and make a happy customer. So many people think that the money you pay is related to the reviews. And I'm just going to break that down right now and say that's completely false. Some of my biggest ticket writers end up with the most five stars. Usually it's the $200 jobs that end up with the one star. So in my opinion, there's not really a direct relationship with the

happiness of the customer and the price. Now the value is a different story. Did they get a great value? And that's not dependent on price. Value is not price. And, the value is a different story. Did they get a great value? And that's not dependent on price. Value is not price. And have you guys seen that a lot of home service companies have that as a misconception? That's something that I've seen, you know, for myself, right? When I had to replace some steps, and I'm talking to a lot of different masonry contractors, the cheapest price made me feel uncomfortable, right? That didn't mean I went for the gold-plated steps, but I think it's certainly true for many people. They want to get the best results that they can and price,

the higher price often means the best, especially when there's a reason to believe it because of all those great reviews. So let's talk about the opposite now. Let's say I'm in a hole. I'm a three-star on Yelp. I'm a two and a half star on Google. I pick up your tool. Give me some advice on how to dig myself out of that hole. A couple of things there. And first, I want to get back to the coaching that we're talking about doing and that praise in public part. I think a neat way to extend that a little bit is when you've had a negative review and it's been resolved. And that's all been done privately through your coaching with your crew or team

member. But now it's been solved and they wrote a great review saying they'll always use this, they'll always recommend you. That's an interesting one to bring to the team and let the individual person talk through the play, how they kind of missed the ball, didn't catch it, didn't throw it in the right direction, and then how they recovered it. And so it's ending on a very positive note, and you're not criticizing their being self-reflective. And I think in that sense, right, we need players to self-coach a little bit. And that's really about getting out of that hole. The first thing that we're going to do is hook it up to your CRM if you have one.

You don't have to have one, but it works a hell of a lot better. But then we're going to send out review requests to your customers and immediately start generating positive reviews. And then the next step is really up to the business. And I want to get into the psychology of a negative review.

And I don't mean the psychology of the user who wrote it. That's a whole separate conversation, but the psychology in the business. It's like one of those movies where all of a sudden it's a war movie and the sirens are going off and everybody's diving into the bunkers. And that's not a good mentality. It's overreacting. It's not a positive way of looking at the world. And we talked about earlier what happens when that negative review gets resolved. There's literally 20, 30 years of academic research into that subject around hospitality, especially. It's called the service recovery paradox. And it's rigorously shown that if you can solve someone's problem to the level of their satisfaction, not your satisfaction, not what your dispatcher thinks would be the right solution,

but to their satisfaction, maybe all it took was an apology and a handshake. But if you can satisfy them, then they will become more loyal than a customer who didn't have a problem. And that's really, that's BirdEye. You start generating those new reviews, which is going to fill out your inventory of reviews. So there's plenty of good ones. And then you have to listen, you have to coach. And then I think it depends on the business. Two or three months later, there's been a turnaround. You're starting to see a lot higher star ratings and the negative reviews are there and they're starting to have responses and they're starting to have responses, and they're starting to show, yeah, there was a negative review, and we fixed it. And that's a company that I want to do business with

because I don't believe anyone's perfect. But when I see that they accept that and resolve and stand behind their work, that's the guy I want to call. And I mean, there's often a kind of like a bias. If you're not asking every single customer for a review, then you might end up with a couple of disgruntled customers who are voicing their opinions online. But the whole process of automating it

and asking every single customer obviously creates a much more accurate picture of you as a business. And then we'll get you to where you need to be in order to rank in the top ranks. And we work closely with Google in regards to their partner of ours to reflect that as well and to integrate that into your daily process. And they want to have a trustworthy ecosystem and obviously capture that customer voice, which is so, so, so important. And it's

one of the highest factors in your search ranking is your overall rating and amount of reviews. So you do want to have that accurately reflect who you are as a business, address potential problems, and turn that around, even if you have been in a hole for a little while. Yeah, you're not going to get all great reviews, unfortunately, people. It's just not possible. I mean, Disney is supposed to be the happiest place on earth. They've got a great reputation, but there's times that they can't please everybody.

Stuff happens. So there's times when we break down or we're too long at a customer's house or maybe the price wasn't what they thought it would be because we found something else wrong with the unit. It's just you never know what's going to happen. But I think one of the ways is to start caring and getting the owner involved. And whether that means giving money back or showing up to their house or whatever that looks like, is you can call back. back, the first thing I would do with a bad reputation is I'd literally get involved as the owner and have one person, maybe my assistant or my CSR or my dispatcher or a good technician that's willing to help me out on the weekends, reach out to these people and say, listen,

I want to get this result. Even if it's two years old, say, look, I want to come out there for a completely free tune-up. I'm going to replace your rollers, your new bottom rubber, or if you're an HVAC company, we want to do this, this, this. But say, listen, unfortunately, I was in my truck the whole time trying to run this business. I didn't know the mistakes. We've got a pretty sophisticated system now. I'm more involved in working on the business than I was in the business. If you would allow me to fix this, I'd love the opportunity. I've just been going through some of these reviews that I never really pay attention to. I was a good technician, but I didn't know how to be a business owner, but I'm here now to make it right. If you could get some of those

one stars at least removed, it's better to make them a five star, but you don't need to change a bunch of them. I think it takes something around 22 five-stars to make a one-star into a five-star. I forget exactly what the numbers are, but it's really hard when stars start accumulating. So getting rid of them and then being a little bit more proactive. I think what you guys have done for me is you've taken my database of past customers like last year when I first got on and said, hey, we could send a blast out to start to get you going, to get some real good, really move the needle fast. Isn't that right? Correct. That's usually how we can start a relationship. And to your point earlier, you can also use BirdEye as a marketing and survey tool where the NPS survey that you mentioned

earlier, you can send out through BirdEye as well. And yeah, kicking off the relationship, oftentimes, if you have a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand customers, you can upload them into the database and then ask the simple questions. Hey, I hope you enjoyed our service. Would you mind leaving us a review on platform of your choice? Because sometimes certain platforms are more important for you or you want to focus on a certain platform just like you said earlier, next door or so for a period of time.

So whenever you are asking for the review, you as the business owner can choose where you want to point people to. Oftentimes it might be Google, but you can direct them into any sort of platform. And to your point earlier, there is research out there that states just having a super clean,

squeaky five-star picture of your business is actually not necessarily the best way to go. And oftentimes, like you said, you cannot really avoid the negative reviews. So having a 4.7 or 4.8 or 4.9 and addressing the negative ones with the positive message will create an even better picture of a business. Yeah. I mean, it's just a ton of research. It's more believable that people sometimes fail and that the best businesses fail. And so having that 4.8, as Frederick said,

can actually make your business seem a little bit more believable, especially also someone who's got 25 reviews and they're all five stars. And you say, maybe you've got 900 and it's 4.9. You're going to be tons more believable. Again, also, again, service recovery paradox. Every one of those negative reviews is a goldmine. It's a goldmine to get a more loyal customer. And if you're reliant on referrals for your business, because you don't really often in a roofing business, that sort of service, then it's still worth the investment to get that loyal referrer. And I would go one step further. We were talking about the surveys. There is a survey module in BirdEye. And so maybe you asked for that review

at the end of the service. But talk about all the things that goes into the job. Someone had to get on the phone or whoever they manage. And we come back and talk about web chat, but they requested someone come and give them an estimate or a price, whatever it is. And then sometimes that has to be done once or twice because there's competitors, they've changed their mind. Then the job may be done. There may be an inspection. There may be a curing or a period of time where everything's breaking in. And through all of those touch points, you don't necessarily have to ask for an online review, but you can send a survey.

How was our job writer? How was the actual service? Your first day at your home, was everything left the way you'd want it left? There's all kinds of things. And what's neat is over the course of a year, you don't always have to ask the same thing. You can ask a bunch of different questions to help you as the owner look at a

range of things. Was it neat? Were they professional? Did they park where they were supposed to park? Everything that reflects potentially badly on you, and you can use BirdEye not only to get those insights for what to create a survey on by looking at all of your reviews across all the platforms, you can also look at your competitors. And if you see that your competitor is getting banged for leaving a messy job site or that kind of thing, well, do you have that problem? Send a survey, find out, solve it. And to learn from your competitors' mistakes as well as your own shortcomings. Yeah. One of the things I look at too is I usually have my CSRs log into Yelp on their

own account, and then they put in the fine friends and see if that potential customer has a Yelp account. Because I kind of like to know who I'm dealing with. If they've got all one stars, it means they're hard to please, and you better be walking on eggshells. But we know they have a Yelp account, stuff like that, but if they're all one stars just every week, bad dry cleaning, bad restaurant, made us wait, just crap, and it's almost all negative, I really don't want to bring that person on as much, if that makes sense. So I use reputation management to the next level.

But yeah, listen, I really think BirdEye, for those listeners out there, I endorse it. It works great for me. It's done a lot of magic in my business. I wouldn't have got these guys on if I didn't think so. to the listeners that you'd recommend? And I'll give you guys each a minute, you know, between Frederick and Harry, whoever wants to go first, to kind of talk to the listeners and let them know what your thoughts are and maybe any last comments. I want to talk about our web chat and just define what that is.

You have a website and there's a little box where someone can leave a question. A lot of social sites have a similar kind of message. And larger companies, it's really easy. They have people standing by 24 hours a day to respond to those kinds of questions. And if you're dealing with your cable out and the game's coming on, you're going to stay right in that web chat until it's answered.

What we find for smaller businesses, local businesses, businesses like what we're talking about, neither of those conditions exist. The customer isn't going to stay there and wait for a response. they have to leave their phone number or their email. It hits the app that you've mentioned. It hits the dashboard, and you could respond a minute later or 20 minutes later or an hour or two later. And what we find is, again, for a local business, that kind of response time is really welcome. Plus the upside, you just captured a phone number and email that you can look up to see if they're existing customer, that if they're not an existing customer, you can add them to your marketing. And we find that for a lot of businesses and their customers, it really makes sense. Again, because neither side has to be sitting there waiting for someone to respond. Each side can go about their business and still communicate what was important. Another very important point is that, obviously, customer acquisition and marketing has changed.

It's not the billboard or radio ad or something like that anymore. It's much more current customers talking to future customers. And that customer voice is out there and you've got to utilize it to your advantage to be found, to be the chosen business, and to be the best business. So that people can make that choice and click on you based on your ratings and reviews online. And it's become ever more crucial for you to manage that well, stay on top of it, and utilize it. Tommy, I can throw out one other thing. Yeah. You've done episodes on SEO.

We know how important SEO is. And the core of SEO, right, is content. And the reality is there's only so much content that you can write. You had, again, the episode I heard most recently was with Tommy. You know, you said he used to work for PayPal and Airbnb. They've got all kinds of really interesting content that they can write. The local roofer, the local garage store guy, you can have a couple articles. Maybe there's a local ordinance that's really unique to your area that's worth chiming in about, but it's really hard. You know, you could pay a fortune.

You're not going to come out with that much new content. So the way I think about BirdEye and SEO is these reviews are your technical content. They're the content that has all the keywords that Google cares about for your business. It's your customer's voice talking about how they found you, how they chose you, talking about why you're the best. And that's the content that moves the local SEO needle. Yep. People don't understand that, but it's a big, big factor. Yep. So yeah, I guess I just got to tell everybody, you know, big fan of these guys. I wouldn't use them for my business if they weren't kicking butt. And I see a lot of customers

last year, we saw 67,000 customers. And now that I got this tool working for me, I know it's an absolute game changer. So appreciate everything you guys do. Is there any last thoughts? I mean, thank you so much for having us on the show here. Really appreciate it. And yeah, encourage your listeners to check out birdeye.com. And if they mention the podcast, maybe we can cut a deal as well. Perfect. Hey, I just wanted to take a quick minute and thank you for listening to the podcast. You know, most people don't understand this, but the way that the podcast has grown is when people subscribe and they leave a review. So if you would please, please, please, why it's top of mind, take a quick minute to subscribe and leave a quick review.

It'll help me out so much. If you just took a little bit of time right now, I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate the listeners and the feedback. And also, when you subscribe, what I'm going to do is let you know the next guest coming on the podcast. And I'll let you email me anything you want me to ask that next person coming on. All the pros I have on here, I want your feedback. I want you to subscribe so you can start giving me the questions you want me to ask and help us grow together. Also, I'm giving away my book for free now. All you got to do is go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. You got to cover the shipping and handling, but I'm giving the material out for free. It's 200 pages. It's a hardcover book,

homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. I appreciate each and every one of the listeners. And thank you for making this Home Service Expert podcast a success. I hope you're having a great day. And thanks again.