Spencer’s TV & Appliance has been in business for 45 years. And you don’t stay in business that long if you aren’t providing a high-quality customer experience. Despite all those years of good customer service, Spencer’s online reviews didn’t reflect that.One of the biggest problems that seemed to be inhibiting them was finding the right time to ask their customers for a review. That was because the customer experience with Spencer’s typically isn’t over until their appliance is delivered.Asking for a review too early led to very poor response rates, but asking too late didn’t help either. So the result was oftentimes only receiving reviews from the small number of customers that had a bad experience.
“When something went wrong like our delivery guy scratched their floor or there was a problem with the appliance, that’s when our customers were motivated to leave a review,” said Matt Kellso, IT & Digital Marketing Director at Spencer’s. “We make about 350-400 deliveries per day and less than one percent of those people were having a bad experience. We needed to find a way to capture the voice of the vast majority of our customers who had a good experience.”
Closed Loop Feedback
In an effort to improve its online reputation, Spencer’s decided to give Podium a try. To ensure success, Kellso and his team worked hard to find the right time to send the review invitation. Ultimately, what has worked best for them is automating the review process at the time of delivery.
Through Podium’s robust API, they were able to connect directly to their delivery and logistics software to automatically trigger invitations when the order was marked delivered. The integration places an API call to Podium every 20 minutes, ensuring that invitations are sent when service is still top of mind for the customer. With the integration in place, the number of reviews coming in has increased significantly. “Having the ability to send review invites almost immediately after delivery to all of our customers has been a big win for us,” said Kellso. “We really like that it creates a closed loop system for collecting feedback.”
No More Explaining Away Bad Reviews
Now that Spencer’s is receiving a large number of positive reviews on a daily basis, employees no-longer have to explain away bad reviews. Many of the customers that frequent Spencer’s 12 locations in the greater Phoenix area do so because of the business’ stellar online reputation. Since implementing Podium in May of 2016, the business has improved its Google rating from 3 stars to 4.7 stars. It has also collected more than 4,000 new reviews across all platforms. “If you look at our Google rating, it’s nearly five stars across the board and that has certainly helped us a lot,” stated Kellso. “We’ve started to invest more in Google advertising and having that tied into our reviews has really helped improve our response rates.”
Podium Has Been a Game-changer
If Kellso could offer any advice to a business that is evaluating Podium, it would be to not hesitate because the benefits you achieve far outweigh the risks. “Ever since we automated our review invitations it has really been a game-changer for our online reputation,” concluded Kellso. “Now I don’t even worry about it anymore.”
