Anyone who runs an HVAC business and is involved in the HVAC industry knows that word of mouth is the lifeblood of the business. When your customers are happy, they will give positive feedback, and they will immediately recommend your company to everyone they know, especially people who particularly needs your HVAC services.
Customer feedback is, and always has been, essential and valuable to any business in general. If you’re running your HVAC business, customer feedback can help you refine your service offerings and products. You can use it to help create new HVAC services and products by simply revealing customer issues, unmet marketplace, and many more.
All of the reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations are crucial to your HVAC Company’s bottom line. In this blog, let’s find out the many ways you can gain tons of reviews online and how you can best respond both to negative and positive reviews.
Why Online Reviews are Important on your HVAC Business
The reality is that most people today rely significantly on online reviews whenever choosing HVAC service providers. And according to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey:
- 57% of consumers state they used business with four-star (or higher) ratings.
- 86% of consumers read online reviews of local businesses.
Moreover, in an Inc.com post, discussion research entirely shows how:
· 91% of people occasionally or regularly read online reviews
- 84% trusted online reviews similarly how they trusted a personal recommendation
- 68% form an opinion after reading 1 to 6 online reviews
Therefore, the real question, especially for HVAC companies (project leaders) that always have wanted to place themselves competitively in the marketplace and community, isn’t “Should I need to focus more on improving our review profile?” Instead, the question should be asked “Which HVAC review sites deserve my attention and time?”
Also, apart from figuring out the right answers to these questions, project managers are tasked to lead and direct the team, ensuring everyone participates. Not only do they lead and manage, but they also give a lot of effort to baseline a project, ensuring that the project is completed within scope and within budget.
The Impact of Online Reviews on Your HVAC Business
As you are starting to understand, online reviews can mean so much to your company’s bottom line. The reviews and customer feedback make a huge difference between a customer choosing your business or choosing your local competitors’ services instead. Oftentimes, some reviews appearing online will be your customer’s first and initial exposure to your HVAC business and the services you offer. As a result, you have to ensure that the overall experience can provide a better first impression.
Usually, you want at least a positivity rate of at least seventy-five percent in your online reviews so that your HVAC business will look attractive to new clients. It would help if you also embraced all kinds of reviews, both negative and positive because doing so will make your company appear authentic.
Reviews of all kinds will always happen, and addressing them will help you recognize your strengths and areas you lack. For instance, negative reviews are problematic, yet negative feedback can help you drum up extra business.
This is how you respond to negative reviews you’ve been getting:
- Hear their concerns. Your very first step must be making the negative reviewer further understand that you see their reviews and recognize their main concerns. Sometimes, a lot of things can happen and you missed many things. The client can be picky or just having a bad day and just wanted to vent out.
- Be understanding and humble. A nice and professional way to do this is to give thanks to the customer for pointing out issues that they have experienced from your company or the services you offer. It will help promote the idea of wanting to improve your company, especially in servicing area. You also become more knowledgeable of the identified issues and are willing to help the client find the best solution.
Remember that in most cases, the issue isn’t your company’s fault. However, it would be best if you were professional because the simplest effort to meet the discontented customer halfway can work wonders.
- Apologize sincerely. Never forget to apologize because doing so will help your disgruntled customers feel more at ease. It also shows potential customers that your company is willing to own up to rising issues and concerns. Owning up mistakes and problems also indicates that your company is ready to take responsibility for any errors during the HVAC service process.
Always make a genuine effort to reach out to your customers and apologize if necessary. This way, you can efficiently address any HVAC mishaps and turn any customer’s negative responses into positive feedback. Lastly, while these things happen, it’s always has been a good idea to explain the mishap. In this way, misunderstanding can be cleared, and it will put your dissatisfied customers at ease.
This is how you respond to positive reviews you’ve been getting:
Once you have received positive reviews, especially the feedback that you’re expecting, remember that your job isn’t over yet.
- Follow up all positive online reviews. You must follow up with all positive reviews so that you appear to be engaged and in touch with all your customer’s needs. Positive reviews are a beautiful thing, and reviews like these can provide your potential new clients with some concrete evidence that the HVAC services your company offers are top-notch and outstanding.
- Acknowledge. When you acknowledge the presence of the positive reviews online, it will make your HVAC business more attentive, helping your potential customers understand that your company appreciates their choice of selecting your business as their service provider. It will give your clients significant reasons to seek out your company once again whenever they need HVAC services.
Speaking of your company’s HVAC services, they should be high in quality and continues to satisfy your clients. By simply deploying a project management tool such as Pro Crew Schedule, you can best outline any project or upcoming services you offer to customers. There is a better way of managing and scheduling construction once a specialized tool like Pro Crew Schedule is deployed to your business.
If you want to have full access to all data and complete control of the project flow, Pro Crew Schedule gives you all the features you need. Try our 30-day Trial for FREE to experience all of its unique features. Request a live demo now!
How to Get More and More Online Reviews?
1. Automated Review Follow-Ups
People forgetting to give feedback has been a huge issue recently. And that’s when you have to consider new techniques and implementing technologies. Suppose your HVAC team uses an HVAC-specific construction scheduling software like Pro Crew Schedule. In that case, anybody can input all review details and track the whole thing, making the entire process much faster and less timewasting.
And as soon as the HVAC service is labeled as COMPLETE, you can trigger automatic email follow-up, asking new clients for a review. You also have the option to create even more advanced workflows to send another set of requests, especially when the first one doesn’t get clicked or opened.
2. Email blast to your present customers
You and most employees in your company may be corresponding with clients via email for an entire day. Why not turn everything into a passive review request. If you have done tons of service calls for the past months and still haven’t done a great job at requesting reviews, you may do it retroactively by distributing an email blast to any of your clients on your current list.
This scenario makes sense to ask for customer feedback instead of asking for a Google review. Make sure to ask your client to rate their whole experience on a scale of one to five. Doing so will make it an easy and one-click response for them.
For clients who rate your services five, ask them for a review. Those who rate you below must always ask for a review to particularly determine what you can do better.
3. Place a Google Review Badge on Your Site
If you still don’t have a review business card, you may find yourself in a situation where you ask people for a review during a casual conversation. The process itself needs to be as easy as possible. And rather than trying to explain to some individuals to find your review link on Google, you can tell them to go to your site and click the review badge located at the bottom of the site. Make sure to link that directly to your review URL.
4. Incentivize your team to get more reviews
Everybody in the business love to participate in a friendly competition. You can create a game out of obtaining reviews. Do the following below:
- Make a leaderboard in the break room.
- Offer gift cards to the employee who gets the most reviews within a month.
- Offer the bosses and seniors some parking spots for a week.
- Give your top review recipient a trophy or a badge to wear.
- · Lastly, make use of a construction planner to set clear, realistic and measurable goals for this competition.
The ideas delineated above may sound silly, but you will be surprised how it affects your employees.
5. Give your Field reps review the company’s business cards
Whenever your professional and competent HVAC service techs finished up their job at a client’s business or home, make sure they close the conversation by asking for feedback or review. You can use best track and monitor all your employees and crew members using subcontractor scheduling software. Only some specialized software tool like Pro Crew Schedule allows you to communicate efficiently to your whole team, improving transparency and collaboration. Everything is also time-tracked which creates a streamlined workflow. As a result, no tasks are overlooked, and no members are left unmonitored.
Let them hand out a business card to the clients. Business cards are simple cards, but they have enough info about your company. You can say, “Please share a five-star experience on Google.” There should be a URL for the Google My Business account right next to the phrase.
Pro Tip: You can check out the Google link generator to create your very own shortened review link.
Key Takeaways
Everybody believes it’s all about finding new customers using advanced techniques and intelligent marketing to run the HVAC business successfully. Yet, the only way you can widely expand your HVAC business and retain your current customers is through monitoring online reviews. And simply following and applying all the tips outlined in this blog, will help your HVAC business become the go-to for people looking for a trusted HVAC company.
