Cleaning up the customer journey at Zerorez.

Zerorez is an innovative carpet cleaning company that has franchise locations across the United States and continues to grow. Chris Carson, the head of marketing, is one of the people responsible for making that growth possible.

As he searched for the best ways to acquire new customers, Carson narrowed down the criteria that his customers were using to choose a cleaning service and quickly realized that two things were crucial to getting more customers: differentiating on customer service and helping people see that differentiation through customer reviews.

“By far, the most important criteria for making a decision on a service provider is: do I have a recommendation – whether that’s a personal recommendation or a recommendation from online reviews?” said Carson.

“Reviews are what we found to be the most beneficial to us in capturing that customer who is looking for carpet cleaning, so we turned to Podium. We fell in love with the idea of proactively asking for reviews and making it super easy for the customer to leave the review.”

GETTING AUTOMATED

First, Zerorez worked hard to provide great service through their techs and simply had them send the invites to each customer one by one. Many of the techs were too busy or would forget about it, so they switched to a multiple invite feature method that allowed their office team to upload batches of customers all at once, but this made the invites less timely. To help solve these issues, the Zerorez team decided to get automated.

Podium built a direct connection to the Zerorez point of sale system that would trigger a review invitations to go out as soon as a job was marked complete. Now, every customer receives a review invite soon after their service. This consistency, combined with the ease of leaving a review on the customer’s end, helped blow up their review numbers.

“Podium has been great because it is super easy for the customer to leave the reviews,” related Carson. “What made it even better for us was when the team at Podium helped integrate into our point-of-sale system. It made everything so much better for us, because now we’re not asking our techs or our office team to do any more work than they already do. The invites go out after every job automatically, so nobody even has to worry about that part anymore. Podium is already easy for the customer to go through the process, and so it’s just been incredible all the way around.“

IMPROVED CUSTOMER SERVICE

Aside from reviews, Zerorez was an early adopter of Podium Messenger. They did this because it allowed their customer service team to quickly follow up on all service appointments to ensure they were delivering an optimal customer experience. Questions and concerns were quickly answered and resolved using the shared inbox, which helped build customer loyalty and drive positive recommendations.

“The locations that are actively using Messenger have found that their responses to problems are much quicker than they ever have been in the past,” said Carson “People are much more comfortable texting back and forth in most cases, so if they’ve got a problem, we’re able to quickly respond.”

Not only have these text conversations resulted in one-off happy customers, Carson also confirmed that their Net Promoter Scores (NPS) have gone up.

IMPROVING THE BUSINESS

The value of collecting online reviews goes far beyond your star rating. Each of these reviews represent a real customer with valuable feedback of what your business has done well, and what your business could do to improve. Carson said that Zerorez has started to utilize the Sentiment Analysis feature to “help improve our operations from the reviews we’re getting and trends that we’re seeing and being able to address issues that are popping up frequently.”

“We also love the competitive analysis,” said Carson. “Being able to look at how you compare against your competitors is very helpful. The competitive analysis helps guide you on important SEO metrics like amount of content, overall rating, and recency of reviews.”

Combining review management and customer interaction into one convenient platform has helped Zerorez maintain a great relationship with their customers which will continue to power their growth.

“Reviews impact my buyer’s decisions,” concluded Carson. “That’s what I have seen, and that is what the data says. So I know if we have enough good reviews, people who are looking for carpet cleaners and run across my business will give us the nod.”