We all want to feel like the brands we interact with care about delivering what we need, when we need it, and doing a good job in the process. And when it feels like the whole interaction is thoughtful and designed just for us, it leaves a lasting good impression.
But how do you make that happen when you’ve got thousands of customers to serve? Understanding your customers’ wants, needs and concerns — from the practical to the emotional — is a smart place to start. And customer reviews are a powerful way in; it’s their take, in their words, ready for your team to pick up and build from.
The team at Provident CRM saw the immense value in providing customer feedback directly in context to where your team are working, so we built a solution that combines the market-leading reputation management tool and CRM’s best-kept secret, SugarCRM: it’s a Trustpilot plugin you can add to your SugarCRM setup. Designed to be as intuitive and flexible as the rest of what Sugar offers, it blends the world’s leading community for customer reviews into the CRM flows you’re already using. All you need to do is drag, drop and quickly configure.
We reckon integrating your CSAT feedback into your CRM records is a no-brainer, really. For building trust and loyalty, making sure your customers get what they need from you, and adding the touches that’ll cement your brand as their go-to. So, if you’re ready to learn more or you’re up for a free trial of our new Trustpilot plugin for SugarCRM, click here.
And for more about the build process and the benefits, keep reading. We spoke to Kate Devos, Regional Sales Director at SugarCRM, and Gary Cullen, Chief Revenue Officer at Provident CRM, who’ve shared their thoughts on the Trustpilot plugin here.
How your business gathers and responds to customer reviews is critical to how customers feel about your brand, whether they’ll buy from you once or forever, and whether they’ll recommend you to others.
We look at reviews to see if we can trust a brand
Customers don’t want to risk their cash on products or services that might not deliver — or might be a complete rip-off. The easiest way to find that out is a quick scroll through other people’s experiences with a company. Reviews are the shortcut we use: we know the company itself will always toot its own horn, but the online masses won’t pull any punches.
Reviews are social proof that can sway potential customers
Ads will only ever go so far to convince your customers. But the real-life experiences and insights they can see in reviews from people like them are key to validating your brand’s reliability and reinforcing your credibility.
As one of the most direct lines your team can get to your customers’ honest thoughts, reviews are also free market research for your business. Some of the big-name coffee chains actually devise their flavours and new products based on the chatter found in customer reviews. From product development to marketing strategies, your reviews are valuable feedback that can answer:
In other words… who cares about your brand enough to complain or compliment, what do they have to say about it, and what should you say in response?
“As one of the most direct lines your team can get to your customers’ honest thoughts, reviews are also free market research for your business.”
Kate Devos, Regional Sales Director at SugarCRM
By effectively managing reviews, brands can build trust and encourage loyalty
Ignoring bad reviews is a quick way for your brand to take a reputational nosedive. Curveballs will keep on coming that are both inside and outside your control, from delayed deliveries to misguided product launches. But what ultimately matters isn’t the problem itself; it’s how you deal with fixing it.
So, if you’re a product producer or service supplier, you want to make sure you’re always in the driving seat. If a customer leaves you a review, be that positive or negative, you need to be able to jump on it. Address any issues quickly and publicly, directly with that customer, with a thoughtful solution that’s tailored to their needs. An above-and-beyond response to a bad review can right all kinds of wrongs. Thanking the people who’ve written glowing words never goes amiss, either.
“You want to make sure you’re always in the driving seat. If a customer leaves you a review, be that positive or negative, you need to be able to jump on it.”
– Kate Devos, Regional Sales Director at SugarCRM
With the right tools to track and respond to every review that comes in, you can set your business up to avoid these risky pitfalls.
We’ve explored some reasons why, and outlined how integrating Trustpilot into your SugarCRM setup can help.
Multiple platforms are a time-drain
We see plenty of customers using Trustpilot separately from their CRM, which means they’re moving between multiple platforms. That increases the time needed to get any customer-related task done, creates room for miscommunications, and means those platforms can’t combine their data for better insights. And once you’re managing reviews at scale, properly responding is a never-ending task — unless you’ve got the right tools helping you out. By bringing Trustpilot into SugarCRM, you can get your workflow engine and reporting tools involved. Automate when and how often you request reviews, and under what particular circumstances. Let your CRM consume that feedback and point you to what to do next.
Blockers to scaling
We have one customer who wanted to work through 5,000 Trustpilot reviews a day, but was only managing 100-150 because they were doing it manually. But by integrating Trustpilot and SugarCRM, we’re helping them automate sending out and collecting reviews. With 95% of the reviews done automatically, their team only has to engage in the 5% that need more attention. That’s how to offer a personalised feeling at scale, by using the human touch where it counts. And the more reviews you have, the better you can spot trends and glean learnings across your customers, distributors, outlets, markets and regions.
“With 95% of the reviews done automatically, their team only has to engage in the 5% that need more attention. That’s how to offer a personalised feeling at scale.”
Gary Cullen, Chief Revenue Officer at Provident CRM
Only asking for reviews when things have gone well
People like to ask for feedback when something’s gone well; not so much when we know we’re not going to like what we hear. But your team needs to gather those more uncomfortable reviews, because they’re the ones that a) let you fix anything that has gone wrong as best you can and b) light the way to building bigger and better for your brand. With our Trustpilot plugin built into your SugarCRM flows, you’ll get reviews every time — not just the comfortable times. That gives a true reflection of where your product or service is at, through automating the review process and connecting it to your core CRM data.
Supercharge your understanding of each customer
Building reviews into your CRM puts that 360-degree view of the customer in one place, including purchase history, service records and customer support interactions. You’ll get the whole of the customer lifecycle on one screen: all the information any customer-facing person needs at their fingertips. Because there’s nothing more frustrating than dealing with someone who seems to know nothing about you, your purchase history and why you’ve got in touch (even though you’ve told the company it all before).
Get reviews at every stage, from Sales to Customer Service
Our customers use Trustpilot throughout their CRM flows, from Sales to Customer Service. So we’ve designed the plugin as flexibly as possible, so it can work for you however you use SugarCRM. You’ll know where you need it better than we do, so we’ve built it to work for whatever suits your business.
See your Trustpilot score (and consolidate it per account)
The plugin we’ve built can graphically display your Trustpilot score for each stage of your business processes, for every team member who needs to see them. We can consolidate your scores per account, too, so you’ll have a headline number built from all the people you engage with on a client account.
Automate how you build better customer relationships
With the plugin set up for your CRM, your process could run like this:
It’s all automated; no need for one team to inform another that a particular customer needs extra attention. All your people are just moving towards the same goal, without even needing to know the backstory.
Half the work, double the results
We’ve built our Trustpilot plugin to be a feedback and data flywheel, too: insights from your Trustpilot setup feed into SugarCRM, and insights from SugarCRM feed right back into your Trustpilot setup. It’s flexible and smart enough to be able to extract the strengths from both platforms, to benefit the other. Crunch the numbers with SugarCRM’s analytics, and see your Trustpilot reviews represented through graphs and data.
“We’ve built our Trustpilot plugin to be a data flywheel: insights from your Trustpilot feed into SugarCRM, and insights from SugarCRM feed right back into your Trustpilot setup.”
– Gary Cullen, Chief Revenue Officer at Provident CRM
Let customers opt out, and make sure the right team members have access
We’ve built the option for your customers to opt out of review requests into the plugin, so that’ll be flagged across Trustpilot and your CRM — no need for you to cross-check manually. SugarCRM’s full security model applies to the data coming in from Trustpilot, too, so your different CRM users will only see the customer review information they should.
These days, can any business afford not to listen to its customers? It comes down to how serious your company is about measuring and enhancing its service. Trustpilot gives you a trusted way to gather your customers’ opinions and, because it’s public and external to your own brand, you’ll likely get a fair, honest answer.
Equally handy for B2B and B2C
For our B2C clients, the value of review management is standing out in competitive marketplaces and winning client hearts and minds directly. For B2B, we see the value in monitoring how well contractors, distributors, etc. are performing for your business. And this runs both ways: if you’re the provider in a B2B chain, gathering reviews can show how well you’re delivering and win you that contract back, year on year.
10,000 or 10 reviews, it still matters
You’ll benefit most quickly from our Trustpilot integration if you’re a business managing a high volume of customer interactions or you already have an active online review presence. You’ll see the time-save of automating the majority of your review management, so your team can focus on the thorniest ones. But if you’re a company that only has 10 reviews a month, it’s just as valuable to have those responses in with your CRM data, where you can analyse, categorise and report on them.
When you provide amazing customer service, that’s a brand attribute that’s worth showing off. Trustpilot offers a metric that sets you apart in the marketplace: prospects can see whether you’re worth their time at a glance, and the simple 1-to-5 format means they can process that information about your brand so easily.
Let’s put those great reviews you’ve earned — or that you’re about to earn — front and centre, and nudge those potential customers to choose you.
