Here at ClearlyRated, we’re committed to making it as easy as possible for B2B service firms to maximize the return on their client survey investment. We see many businesses struggle with a critical value-driver in the survey process: capitalizing on the positive feedback they receive from their most satisfied clients. While many organizations understand how client surveys can help their team identify and address negative feedback, most fail to plan for and take meaningful action with the positive responses they receive. It’s a significant missed opportunity, especially as it relates to generating critical, and credible, testimonials from your happy clients (and, for staffing firms, your happily placed talent). That’s one of the reasons we designed our survey tool to capture and share testimonials seamlessly as part of the survey process—so you can learn more about what your clients think about you, and easily leverage that information to credibly prove the quality of the service you provide. Testimonials Really (Really) Matter If you’ve spent any time at all on the internet, you’ve likely used client testimonials to help you make purchasing decisions. Just like we check Yelp reviews before going out to eat at a new restaurant, your potential clients are likely searching for what your clients have said about you while trying to decide whether or not they want to partner with your firm. And while your website and other company-owned communications are important sources of information for potential buyers, we know from our research that what others—particularly your existing or past clients—have to say about your company (as in a testimonial) is far more persuasive than anything that you could be saying about yourself. In fact, more than 9 in 10 buyers of B2B services (like staffing, accounting, legal, RPO, and outsourced HR) say that seeing testimonials from businesses similar to theirs makes an impact on their decision to work with a provider. What’s more, 84% say they trust testimonials, and testimonials are ranked as one of the most persuasive resources buyers use to determine the quality of your firm (second only to referrals from friends or colleagues). Sourcing Good Testimonials Takes a Lot of Work If the research is clear about the impact of testimonials, and we know how powerful they can be from a purchasing perspective, why don’t more service-based firms solicit and share testimonials? And for those who do—why is it so difficult to keep the content fresh, updated, and top of mind? These limitations boil down to the fact that sourcing, organizing, approving, and leveraging client testimonials can be difficult and often represents a lot of work. The process can be challenging, with lots of moving parts and considerations: the discomfort of making the ask, the follow up required to solicit the appropriate permissions, the act of organizing the feedback so that it’s available and ready to be used, and the operational workload of getting the testimonials from account managers to the content teams who use them. The bottom line is that while most service firms understand the importance of testimonials to their marketing and business development, there are several very real hurdles between knowing that to be the case and having your clients’ praise available where your prospects need to see it most. ClearlyRated’s Survey Tool Does the Work of Sourcing Testimonials For You Our survey software is designed to address and eliminate the most common hurdles that your team faces with gathering testimonials. This core feature of our survey product makes testimonial collection and distribution painless, ensuring you always have the most up-to-date client feedback readily available for use across your marketing and business development collateral. How this works: As part of the administration of a Net Promoter® Score (NPS®) survey process, your clients will have the opportunity to reflect on their experience with you numerically (on a 0-10 scale) and in an open-ended question. When a Promoter (a client who indicates they’re happy with the level of service they’ve received by answering the NPS question with a 9 or 10), fills out your survey, they’re automatically directed to a follow up screen, which invites them to consider whether or not they’d like to offer their reflections as a testimonial. Promoters are also offered the opportunity to choose whether or not they want to give you permission to share their feedback publicly, whether they want to be anonymous, or whether they’re comfortable with their name and company being associated with their testimonial wherever it might be shared in the future. You don’t have to do anything to collect the testimonial or secure permission to share it—our tool does all of that for you. And it works. On average, 48% of your company’s Promoters will choose to leave a testimonial. In other words, your NPS survey initiative will generate testimonials from nearly half of your happiest clients and talent. Many of the service providers who survey their clients with ClearlyRated consistently receive dozens, hundreds, or at times even thousands of testimonials each year. What can you do with these testimonials once you have them? The options are endless. You can: Segment testimonials by account owner, practice area, office location, or any other way that your client feedback is segmented. Share approved testimonials to social media, either directly within the survey dashboard or through your own social content-creation process. Include testimonials in proposals, on your website, and in other critical sales and marketing documents. Add testimonials to your ClearlyRated profile page in real-time. Utilize testimonials in any other way that you can dream of leveraging this powerful social proof to tell your team’s story of service excellence. As you can imagine, this volume of testimonials virtually guarantees your marketing and business development teams, internal stakeholders, and management gather plenty of positive feedback to share both externally and internally, according to your needs. Leverage the Full ROI of Your Survey Program It’s not hard to see the value of using a survey to identify and correct any negative experiences your clients might have had with your organization. But if your survey program doesn’t generate powerful testimonials that communicate the experience of working with you from your clients’ perspective, it’s not delivering the full ROI. It’s just as important to understand—and share, in a way others will find believable—the things that you and your firm are doing right. Of course, we’d be thrilled to share even more about how our survey program can help you collect testimonials for your business. Call us at 1 (800) 921-2640 or contact us using our online form to learn more about how we can help maximize the value of your survey program.
