Ask the Experts | Increasing Online Reviews Without Software

Question: Can you suggest a process or system to drive online reviews for my service techs that does not require specific software?

Gary Elekes; EGIA faculty member and EPC Training founder:

The answer is no, I can’t. I wish I could. The reason software exists is to be able to scale. Without software, you’re relying on the individual and as much as I love my techs, they will not be consistent like software will be.

In fact, even with software, we struggle with the consistency of getting technicians to ask for an online review. It’s important to us as a company, it’s important to the techs, it creates opportunities for better SEO, and brand management.

The process would be talking about it, daily training, and reinforcing the conversations. For us, it’s a tracking system. We have 11 components that we track for our service techs on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. One of those things is how many online reviews they got relative to the service calls that they’ve run.

It’s human behavior and when you’re changing human behavior, you always attack the thinking patterns and belief systems first. There’s no getting around chopping wood here, and that’s leadership, communication, training, role play, getting people aligned, building a culture, and making sure people understand why it impacts the long-term nature of the business.

The problem is it’s a high-importance, low-urgency quadrant concern if you go back to the Covey Discussion. It’s important because it affects the overall health of the company but it’s a low-urgency issue for a technician because they can run the service call and it doesn’t really change the outcome of the service call.

Getting your people to understand that it’s something behaviorally they need to do without the use of software is going to be leadership, coaching, and making sure you’re going on ride-alongs and having those conversations.

Personally, I think you’d want to use software. I’m not sure how you’d scale a business and ask people to do it without giving them the right tools, training, and resources to do their job. This makes it easy for the tech and easy for the homeowner. When you make something easy, you’ll tend to see better participation.

To access the full archive of Ask the Expert recordings, log in to the member dashboard.