Three Simple Steps to Collect a Customer Testimonial
- Create a Remarkable Customer Experience
- Listen to and Prompt Your Customer to Give You a Testimonial
- Use Technology to Increase the Reach of Your Testimonial
Steps 1, 2 and 3 are the basic three steps to collect a customer testimonial. Steps 4, 5, 6 and 7 add context, But, let’s break these steps down so you have all the information.
Step 1: Create a Remarkable Customer Experience
Create a “WOW!” Experience. “WOW!” may seem a little vague but Ken Blanchard, business guru and author of Raving Fans puts it this way…
“Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else (in your industry) is doing any better.
Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore.
If you really want a booming business, you’ll have to create raving fans (with a WOW experience).”
Create a WOW customer experience that is memorable and shareable.
What is a specific example of a WOW experience? What surprises and delights your customer so your business becomes memorable AND shareable?
Here’s our blogpost on Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin’s book Talk Triggers – the definitive guide to memorable and shareable customer experiences.
Here are just three examples from Talk Triggers:
- Holiday World & Spashin’ Safari in Indiana gave up its 100% profit margin on soft drink refills for hot and thirsty guests who, often, are in the park 6+ hours with kids and family.
- Oral surgeon Dr. Glenn Gorab of Clinton, New Jersey connects with patients by personally calling each patient before their scheduled surgery.
- Paragon Direct in Manhattan, New York is the number-one seller of Honda and Acura cars in the USA. Their service center offers 24-hour pickup, service and delivery of customer car repairs.
Since most people work, Paragon does most of it’s service work at night, returning the customers’ cars by 7am, in time for the customer to get to work the next day.
Simply put, your customer must be unable to NOT share, by positive word of mouth, their experience with you.
Gary Vaynerchuck in “The Thank You Economy” says the following about small businesses in the future:
“…businesses, to have any impact on the future, will have to inspire an emotional connection with their customers.
Social media has transformed our world and that we are living through the early days of a dramatic cultural transformation that is bringing us back, full circle, and that the world we live in and work in today now operates in a way that is surprisingly similar to the world that our great-grandparents knew.
Social media has transformed our world into one great big, small town – dominated by the strength of relationships, the currency of caring and the power of word of mouth.”
Listen to Your Customer
Listen to your customer for ‘trigger statements’ that means you can prompt them to give you a testimonial.
A WOW Trigger Statement
A trigger statement may sound like this:
- “Man! I LOVE this place!”
- “Thanks, Doc! I feel much better, now!”
- “You guys were terrific, I had no idea you could fix my problem so quickly!”
- Your customer may even cry – I’ve had it happen – the key is emotion.
Any positive emotion is an appropriate trigger:
- HappinessReliefSurpriseJoyExcitementBlissJubilation …whatever they share, as long as it’s a positive emotion, their trigger statement should alert you to prompt a testimonial.
YOUR trigger statement in your business may be different – it probably WILL be different, depending on your business. That’s fine, so long as you recognize the trigger when you hear it.
When you hear the trigger, you must move to the prompt.
Step 2: Prompt Your BEST Customer to Give You a Review
- Ask – you simply need to ask your customer for the testimonial.
- Kiosk – a branded kiosk is a great hands-off way to prompt people to give a testimonial.
- Promote Your Local Business with the Free Social Media Kit – 24″ by 36″ poster
- Internal signage – signs and posters inside your facility will help your customer know what to do.
- Download the WOW branded poster (insert your own logo) for use by our clients.
- Place the poster in your place of business.Team training – script the ‘ask’ and train your team using role-playing to prompt a testimonial.
- Lighting: here are our recommendations for small, inexpensive lights for your video testimonial set-up.
The Reciprocity Rule
Dr. Daniel Cialdini in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion describes an experiment where he sent Christmas cards to 20 perfect strangers. He did expect to get some response from these strangers. The amazing thing about Dr. Cialdini’s experiment was that, when he received their reply, almost nobody inquired how he knew them or why he sent them a Christmas card!
This is the power of reciprocity – humans are automatically programmed to respond, in kind, to any act or service performed by another person – even a stranger!
This ‘weapon of influence’ is called the Reciprocity Rule.
The book describes the Reciprocity Rule across all human cultures and societies, primitive to advanced, East to West and all colors of the human rainbow.
To put it simply, the BEST time to ask your customer for a video testimonial is immediately after you have sold them your product or service:
- If you are a chiropractor, immediately after the spinal adjustment.
- If you are a hairdresser or barber, immediately after their appointment.
- If you are an attorney or a real estate agent, immediately after they’ve closed their deal.
- If you are a veterinarian, immediately after they get their pet back.
- If you are a waiter/waitress/restaurant owner, immediately after they enjoy their meal.
- If you are a event producer, immediately after the event is concluding.
- If you are a gym owner, immediately after their workout.
You get the idea, immediate allows you to capture the ENERGY, EXCITEMENT and EMOTION tied up in your product or service.
People buy stuff based on their emotions more so than their reason – why not capture that emotion on video?
Step 3: Show Your Technology
The old way to capture a testimonial was low-tech: whip out a pad of paper and ask your customer to write nice things about your business, snap their photos and hang the whole thing on the wall of your business.
Concerned about Data Privacy? Us, too!The New Way to Collect Customer Testimonials
If you want to embrace the high-tech option, then there are a number of options available to you:
- Stay with paper testimonials (no, seriously, don’t do this.)
- Google Reviews – there are MANY vendors in this space able to automate emails to collect a customer testimonial: Review Management Vendor – BirdEye, TrustPilot, etc.
- Testimonial Collection apps – all of these send an email to your customer AFTER they have left your shop. That probably works for some businesses but why not capture the testimonial at the point-of-sale?
- Capture the EMOTION, the EXCITEMENT and the ENERGY your customer feels when you have exceeded their expectations and delivered that WOW experience. With email, have you lost the emotion, the excitement and the energy of the immediate point-of-sale exchange captured in your store?
- WOW Promoter video testimonials – this is the ONLY testimonial app that works on your device, in your store or office at the moment of exchange.
Capture Video Testimonials at the Point-of-Sale
Capture the ENERGY, EXCITEMENT and EMOTION tied up in your product or service with the WOW Promoter app directly on your phone or tablet. Control your word of mouth on the web and get Google Reviews directly from video.
Why Social Media?
High-volume businesses naturally lend themselves to social media.The easiest, but most underutilized, content for social media is a testimonial video from a happy customer.
Smart businesses can capture the “WOW moment” of surprise and delight where the customer recognizes the excess value over and above the price they have paid for the service or product.
Only customers who verbally express their happiness in person are asked to deliver a video testimonial.
Your customers’ happiness can be qualified as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) which is discussed here.
While there is value in collecting NPS data and quantifying your customers’ willingness to recommend your product or service, NPS data is a lagging indicator.
We recommend a more immediate ability to respond to your customers.
Video Testimonials Capture the Emotion of the Moment
Medical professionals have an advantage in capturing customer testimonials since they spend a lot of face-to-face time with their customers.
Many professionals simply wait for certain “trigger phrases“ their patients say that they recognize from having vast experience and many happy customers. Examples of trigger phrases in chiropractic and physical therapists’ offices
- “I wish I could put you in my pocket take you with me!”
- “I don’t know what I’d do without you“
- “I feel like a new person!“
When any member of the medical team hears the trigger phrase they are prompted to ask the patient in that moment, for a client testimonial video, using one of the kiosks or a tablet computer mounted on the rolling cart.
This makes the collection process simple, seamless and immediate.
The video can be captured by handheld mobile device or, according to industry best practices, with a testimonial kiosk that uses visual prompts, signs and simple instructions to capture the video testimonial.
The short 30-second to 1-minute videos are then relayed to the social media platform of the doctors choice:
- YouTube or others
According to the principles of social proof outlined in Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – the greater number of videos equals greater social proof.
The math is simple – the more videos you can post it in a single social media channel each day the more new customers you will acquire.
Get the free app – save time and $$
If you are an influencer who deals face-to-face with people, like a dentist or a real estate agent, you can become an online influencer using short, testimonial videos on popular social platforms.
We can show you how.
Do you like all the hosting and posting?
All the hashtags, hypertext links and tech-y stuff?
If not, just let the WOW Promoter app do it for you – for free!
