Gallery Furniture conquers their fear of building a fanbase through reviews.

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Gallery Furniture started in the early 80’s by Jim McIngvale, also known as Mattress Mack to his customers. They started off as a single mattress store but have grown to three locations, including two large showrooms serving the eastern side of Texas.

Early on, they set themselves apart from competitors by offering same-day delivery, but as this has become standard among many large online retailers, they realized that their digital marketing and online presence needed some attention.

“We realized we needed to refocus our efforts on digital marketing and getting our name out there,” explained Daniel Marchione, Gallery’s Project Manager/Systems Administrator. “Mattress Mack has been famous with his guerilla marketing tactics that had certainly helped the business in the past, but we realized we were behind the curve on what we were doing in digital. Over the past couple of years, we have worked to ramp up our digital presence. We realized that our reviews online were lacking, so we were looking for a solution and we found Podium.”

MAKING IT PART OF THE PROCESS

Gallery Furniture has built customer feedback into many of their processes, from their digital marketing team down to the individual sales reps. Podium became a natural part of the customer journey. They combine sending invitations manually with an automated Salesforce integration to make sure each customer gets the opportunity to leave feedback. This became such an integral part of their process that the owner actually built it into their compensation plan.

“It’s such a user-friendly app that everyone was up to speed within the first day or two of signing up,” explained Marchione. “As our team honed their technique on approaching customers about leaving reviews, we started to get better and better at it. The owner of our company decided to make getting reviews part of the pay matrix for the sales team. Once he did that, the reviews increased exponentially.”

GETTING FOUND

Gallery Furniture’s improved online presence has allowed them to save money on other marketing efforts, and it has also resulted in a large uptick in web traffic and inbound calls from customers and online searchers.

“Our organic search results online now are incredible,” said Marchione. “It is amazing how we show up without even having to pay for Google search results. We’re not spending nearly as much on paid search results as we have in the past. We’ve had a ton of inbound calls as well because we always show up number one when people search for furniture in Houston. They could be searching for another store and we’ll show up on top of the list, so they will call us.”

“We have been in business for 36 years because of our customer service,” explained Marchione. “Podium has really shown us that we had a huge gap in the opportunity to receive online reviews. We have so many fans out there, but we just weren’t inviting them to review us. Podium gave us the venue to do that. Now that we are, we’re just seeing tremendous results.”

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