Remember fun? Use it to make clients happy.
What are your most memorable, exciting moments? Were they in front of a computer? Or were they painting rocks with your kid brother, playing hide-and-seek in the dark… or hiking through slick forests in Hawaii with your partner, laughing about the giant duck-like shoes on your feet?
Guess what! Everyone counts the fun memories as some of their best memories. And almost no one thinks sitting in front of the computer is “fun”.
Yes, we get cool stuff out of sitting in front of the computer. We watch uber-funny commercials on YouTube, and we play Scrabulous (or whatever’s it’s called now) on Facebook with old friends.
But how do you make the entire experience of doing something on the computer fun?
Um, earth to Joanna, you’re supposed to be talking about real estate ratings…
Yes, I know. So here’s the thing: When you’re trying to get your clients to leave you good reviews, do you want them to go through a boring process or a fun process? Does it even matter? Well, if you think a person’s mood in any way influences how they talk about you at that moment, then, yes, I’d say it matters, wouldn’t you?
That’s why we tried to make the review process on What-Customers-Say.com as enjoyable as possible for your clients. Here are a few things we’ve done to make it non-boring:
- Used bright, fun colours rather than sedate, “too professional” or “too sophisticated” colours
- Used big blocks to help people find what they need to do, like the 3 big blocks on the home page
- Kept the tone casual and familiar, not stuffy
- Reduced text fields (the ones you have to type your answer into) to just 1 required text field… and kept the other 10 or so questions as radio buttons/multiple choice or starred responses
- Used ‘fun language’ alongside the starred responses, so when a user hovers over, say, 4 stars out of 5, a cool message to describe what rating the agent at 4 stars might mean appears
To make it more exciting to leave a review, we’re going to be introducing contests. Every month, we’ll select the most useful review (in the judges’ opinions) and send that reviewer a $100 gift card for Amazon or Best Buy or something cool like that.
What else are we doing to make things fun?
We don’t pretend that our review process is anywhere near as fun as we — and customers — want it to be.
That’s why we’re going to be adding cool new features to simplify, for example, the process to find a real estate agent. Yup, we’re mid-way through the process of providing a cool recommender tool, where a person looking for an agent on our site doesn’t only look through the reviews on his/her own but can opt to let us help them find the right agent. Think of tools you use to build a car online (like, on BMW’s site)… and imagine the user building, in a way, his/her ideal agent on our site.
Imagine how fun it will be…….! Imagine what a great start to a relationship you’ll have with your new clients when they find you using a pretty sweet tool like this. Talk about setting the tone for a strong relationship based on compatibility — and the makings of more great reviews for you on www.What-Customers-Say.com
~jw
