MSP 101: Automating Customer Feedback for MSPs

Using this system can get you regular 5* google reviews for your business, with no ongoing work involved depending on how you set it up.

This system works so well that one of my IT Course members sent me a message recently to tell me that in just 3 months they got almost 4 times the number of reviews than his biggest local competitor. That is just one of many things we cover in the course. Follow the link here if you want to learn more about the course. In this post, I will give you everything you need to do this yourself and get equally great results.

INTRO

First up - If this is your first time here, hi my name is Pete, and over the last decade I grew and sold my own IT Business and I'm now helping other Business Owners to be more productive and grow their business.

STEP 1

This system works for all types of businesses. Yes IT Businesses, but also for retail and other B2B services.

First, here is how the system fundamentally works.

Step 1 - You deliver the goods to your customer. You fix their issue. You deliver their purchase - whatever it might be. At this point, you are going to send them a basic survey which they'll respond to in whatever way they feel.

Step 2 - You are going to pick up the ones who left you great feedback and then send them a second email asking them to leave a Google review.

That is fundamentally it. Not complicated and not expensive. You are asking for reviews, and then picking the best reviews and funneling them to your Google page.

You might think this is a little unfair - but we all know how unlikely it is for actual happy clients to take time out of their day to say anything nice about you publicly. Unhappy clients will be straight over to voice their dissatisfaction, so this is your way of tipping the scales in your favour and providing an overall fairer picture of your business.

So how do you actually do this then? Well, first we're going to use a tool called Customer Thermometer as Step 1 for collecting initial feedback.

When we close a ticket for a customer, or when we deliver a product to a customer, we're going to email them to thank them and ask for feedback, which is in the format of just 1 click on a smiley face.

Then, when someone clicks on a face, it pops up to ask if they want to leave a comment. Now Customer Thermometer does start at $29 per month, however, there are 2 things here, first, use the coupon code pmatheson20 to get 20% off your first 3 months, secondly, with Customer Thermometer, you only pay when you actually get feedback. Their base tier at $29 includes 50 responses per month, let's just call them 50 credits.

Each time someone leaves you feedback, that costs 1 credit. So if you don't get 50 responses per month, you can actually sign up for Customer Thermometer, pay $29 and then pause your account until you need to buy more credits.

I LOVE Customer Thermometer because of that - because if you don't get any feedback, it doesn't cost you anything and you are basically guaranteed to get 50 pieces of feedback for $29. Sign up, and create your first thermometer - which we're going to embed into an email.

If you're in the IT World, you can embed this directly into IT Specific tools like Connectwise and AutoTask, or if you're not, then use the one best suited for your business, which is probably your email system like Gmail or Outlook.

Whilst you are running through the rest of their wizard, you want to be asking the right questions.

For the red face, you want to tell them that someone will be in touch as soon as possible to discuss why. For yellow you want to apologise, maybe get in touch and ask them why they felt that way. For Green, you want to ask them what could you do better next time to get gold feedback.

For gold - pay attention to this, because this is kind of what leads on to the next step. For Gold, you want to ask them something like 'Why did you leave us such good feedback this time'? You do this because you're encouraging them to think about all the good stuff.

Get that setup, and get it embedded into your system. For the IT People when embedding this tool you'll also want to grab the fields for things like Ticket number, Ticket Summary, and some other areas, which you can use the custom fields for. But for anybody else, get this embedded into your tool - and if you struggle then have a chat with Customer Thermometers Support who can guide you through.

STEP 2

Here is where you are actually going to ask for the Google Review, and we'll be using Customer Thermometer again and another tool called Zapier - or for the IT Geeks amongst us, you can get away with Microsoft Power Automate to replicate the same thing.

Back in Customer Thermometer, go to Push Options, Configure Webhooks, Add new endpoint - Call it Google Reviews, skip the URL for now and underneath, uncheck everything except Comment from a Gold Response.

Before you hit test or save, open up a new tab, and head over to Zapier.com. Once you're signed in, Create a new Zap and then you want to trigger this on a Webhook, and you want to Catch Hook. Click Continue and that will give you the Webhook URL that you need for the Customer Thermometer. Copy that and head back to Customer Thermometer, paste it in. Click Test to make sure it works and then Save.

Just before you leave Customer Thermometer, there's one more thing you need to do. Scroll back to the top and click Linked Thermometers where you want to include the Thermometer you just created a moment ago. Then click Save again.

Cool - Back over to Zapier, we're almost there - I promise!

Click Continue, and then Test Trigger - Zapier will pull in some sample data which Customer Thermometer sent over when you did that test a minute ago, and just click Continue.

Now, for the Action, you want to pull in your favourite email client, Google or Outlook and you want to send an email that is basically going to say

'Hi, First Name,

Thanks for your recent feedback - hugely appreciated.

We are currently working on boosting our Google Reviews, and I was hoping that if you had 2 minutes to spare, you might be able to click on this link and leave us a quick review.

If you've already left one recently then feel free to ignore this and thank you so much for that, and if there's anything else we can do for you then just let me know. '

Something like that.

Before finishing this off, you'll want to grab the DIRECT link to your Google reviews.

So for that, head into Google My Business and find the section that says 'Get More Reviews' and grab the direct link from here. Copy and paste that into your email in Zapier.

Make sure it's all tested, and the Zap is switched on - now just do a final test to make sure everything is working and you're golden!

Using this system which is 100% automated, will deliver work for your clients and collect a tonne of internal feedback, both good and bad. For any people leaving good feedback, they'll be funnelled to your Google my Business Page to leave a review on there.

I've implemented this for many businesses now and in every business we've seen a dramatic uptick in customer feedback and public google reviews. For those of you who now have more feedback than your local competitors - well, now you can be known as 'The most recommend XYZ business in your local area'! Magic.

For the IT Businesses watching, if you want to know more about this and tonnes of other content on how to grow, marketing, run, and everything else for your IT business - then follow the link below where I teach everything I learned from building my own IT Business turning over more than £1m in revenue. If there's anything that's not covered, then tell me and I'll make sure it gets sorted.

For more MSP videos head over to my channel and subscribe!

Thanks for reading and I'll see you in the next one!

🛒 Sign up for my MSP coaching course: https://www.notabusinesscoach.com/nab... 

🛒 Use this to get Customer Thermometer (Use code 'pmatheson20' for 20% off for first 3 months): https://geni.us/3BSVCgn

🎥 One of the best MSP Services: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNgYy... 

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