Reviews are crucial to the management team at Alpine Specialty Cleaning. After 50 years in the business, they had a lot of loyal customers.
Alpine knew they were the number-one carpet cleaner in the Pacific Northwest, but their online reputation wasn’t reflecting that success. As of 2016, they had collected only 100 reviews with a rating of only 4.1 stars.
“Our owner is obsessed with reviews,” said Cody Alexander, Administrative Manager at Alpine Specialty Cleaning. “Reviews are everything for our business because of how many competitors we have in our industry, but before Podium we didn’t have an effective way of collecting them.”
Once Alpine implemented Podium, it didn’t take long to set itself apart from the competition. In three years, Alpine has collected 2,318 reviews on Google and now boasts a 4.9-star rating.
“Now, we’re the top-rated carpet cleaner in the Pacific Northwest on Google,” related Cody. “So, when someone searches for businesses like ours online, we show up in the number-one spot.”
In addition to showing up at the top of Google search rankings, Alpine was able to take advantage of the increased traffic to their website. They added Podium Webchat to their site and are now collecting 170 new leads every month.
While reviews were a good avenue to get input from customers about high-level operations, the team at Alpine wanted to collect more in-depth feedback. When Podium launched Feedback, they were quick to sign up.
Cody is responsible for monitoring the feedback as it comes in and makes sure to follow up with anyone who rates the business with a score of eight or lower to see if there’s something he can do to fix the problem.
“We look at Feedback as an opportunity to learn and improve,” said Cody, “so when I respond I’m trying to get as much information as possible to see if there’s something we can do to make the customer happy. Without Podium Feedback, we wouldn’t be aware of a lot of customer problems that arise.”
“Because we’re a family-owned business, it’s important for our interactions to feel personal,” concluded Cody. “And, being able to text with our customers to collect feedback and answer questions makes it easy for us to do that, while also being more convenient for our customers.”