Episode 3: Feedback – How Will You Know If You Don’t Ask?

Let’s talk about asking for reviews. In this first part of a multi-part discussion, Carrie and Erin tackle tips and tactics around how to “ask” your clients and customers for that important review.

Making each customer feel like you’re asking them, personally, for honest feedback on the product or service will go a long way towards ensuring follow-through. Learn why incentivizing employees is probably a bad idea, and hear some tips and tactics for keeping track of the work-flow as you complete the work and get those reviews.

Intro: 00:05 Welcome to the Community Karma podcast with Erin Jones and Carrie Hill. Join in as they discuss building community branding and how any business can benefit from a holistic approach to grow.

Carrie: 00:21 Hello everybody. Welcome to episode three of the Community Karma podcast. I am Carrie Hill. She is Erin Jones. Hello. Hello. Erin Jones.

Erin: 00:31 Hey. Hey Carrie Hill.

Carrie: 00:35 Erin and I have been, you know, tossing around what, what topic we wanted to pick off our giant list of topics for our third episode of the Community Karma podcast and decided that reviews would be a good topic for us to jump into. And because reviews is such a big topic, we’re actually going to split it up into a few different episodes. This episode specifically is going to deal with how to ask for a review because I think that that’s something that is kind of awkward, right? I mean, yeah. Like when do you ask and how do you word that and how do you get people to respond to what you’re asking? I don’t lead.

Erin: 01:20 It’s you know, it’s kind of takes us back to those middle school days of working up the courage to ask someone to answer something. You know, we, you’re really putting yourself out there and, and letting someone, you know, you’re, you’re offering yourself up to be torn apart or built up. And that’s kind of a scary place to be for a lot of business owners.

Carrie: 01:40 Well, for sure. And remember back in our, in our agency days, back in the day we work for an agency that dealt primarily with travel and when Erin and I first went to work for this agency every one of their clients was very bury their head in the sand. If we don’t ask, they won’t say anything bad. And that’s how we’re managing our reputation. It was bad, so bad because people were letting them have it and they were just pretending they didn’t exist. There was like this blind spot when it came to reputation and reviews for many, many years in the hospitality industry. I remember. Do you remember that client you had once upon a time that had terrible online reviews and their only response was they’re terrible customers and it had nothing to do with their really crappy front office girl who was mean to everybody and everything to do with the terrible customers even though every review was pretty clear on who the problem was. They totally ignored it. Yeah.

Erin: 02:44 Yeah. That person was mentioned by name and probably every third or fourth review. But you know, they thought that she was fantastic because she kept all the deposits so they had a secondary income stream. Not a good way to do business. Reiterate. We are not condoning that in any way.

Carrie: 03:04 No. So as part of our little mini series on reviews today, like I said, we’re going to talk about how do you ask and to, to kind of compliment that. There was a really great webinar this morning from GradeUs and Greg Gifford and Claire Carlile who, who are two local marketing local SEO folks that I’m involved with via local university, gave some great advice about how to ask and how you know, how to deal with this. The scary asks. So I’ll have the link in the show notes, on the websites and that upload with this episode. So if you want to check out that webinar, you can just follow the Lincoln and check it out. I recommend it. Definitely,

Erin: 03:52 Definitely, definitely. And there, there is an art to the ask. You know, and we don’t want to build people up so much that they’re afraid to go out there and do it, but there are things that you can do that, that make it easier and encourage positive feedback more than just kind of saying, Hey, leave us a review. Dot dot, dot. That’s what we’re going to dive into today.

Carrie: 04:15 Yeah, we kind of call that I think Darren shock came up with the term that enhanced ask Darren Chas from white spark, which is a local marketing tool company out of Edmonton. And with the enhanced ask, like Erin said, we’re not just saying Hey, give us a review. We’re being more specific and we’re trying to use the language that we want them to respond with in the ask. So instead of saying, Hey, leave us a review on your service this week. We say instead Jerry said he had a really great experience replacing your hot water heater last week. We really appreciate great customers like you and on, and then you then, so you’ve already said Jerry, who was their technician and what he did for them. And so then you ask, we’d love to hear about your interaction with Jerry and our company. Where did we excel? Where can we improve? So that that puts all the words that you want them to pair it back in their review, right at their fingertips and front of mind. Right? So the last thing you hear is the first thing you spit back out again.

Erin: 05:28 Absolutely. And there’s some psychology behind the, the wording that you mentioned, Carrie. First of all, when you mentioned Jerry by name, you’re reminding them that they worked with a human, not just some big company that has no feelings. You reminded them of the service that you did and that you appreciate them and you called them an amazing customer, which creates feelings of Goodwill and it will entice them to speak more about you because not only are you saying that you love them as a customer, you’re more likely to get from them that they love you as well because they’re hearing from you, you already got their money. You know, a lot of people expect that once you get their money, you’re going to go away. But you’re coming back and taking the time to say, Hey, we’d love to know more about how everything went. Jerry thought it was great. Do you feel the same way? Typically people are going to be a little bit friendlier even if they had a frustration because of the personal engagement or interaction.

Carrie: 06:25 Well, and I think it’s almost like I’m in your ask if you’re almost leaving a little review of the customer. So you’re saying, you know, people in business have been asking for years for like a platform where we could review the client, right? So you’re kind of saying, Hey, we think you’re amazing and, and the unspoken piece is we want to know or we want you to think we’re amazing to kind of that that please parrot this back to me kind of interaction with them. And like Erin said, they expect once they pay the bill, you’re never going to hear from them again unless you need, they need you again. But if you keep up this conversation with them and you tell them how much you appreciate them, your building brand ambassadors because you’re taking good care of your customers and you’re creating a longterm customer and we know that customers, once you get them, it’s a lot easier to keep them than it is to go out and find a brand new customer. Right? So you want it, you want to keep the happy ones calling your number again and again and again

Erin: 07:27 And referring your number again and again and again, especially what the advent of all of these localized platforms on social media, you know, you’ve got nextdoor and Facebook. Both of those places have asked for recommendation opportunities. Local Facebook groups. You know, when you get into those hyper local personal recommendations, this is a great way to stay top of mind. And then one thing that I would even add on to this message is eating your email signature or after, you know, depending on the customer you need to use your judgment here, but either in the initial email or after they respond to you, provide them with a direct link to where you want them to review you. So

Carrie: 08:05 Absolutely

Erin: 08:06 To heard your reviews to the place that most of your customers are already hanging out. Because the community I live in is not a huge fan of Yelp. You know, they’ve kind of figured out some things that Yelp does and some business practices in a lot of our local business owners don’t even engage there anymore. So if people are leaving reviews there, they’re not going to get seen as well as if someone has to leave with Facebook or a Google review. So let people know where you want to hear from them and make it really, really easy for them to go there and tell others about you.

Carrie: 08:37 Well and not only that, if you’re pointing them directly where you need the reviews, if you need a little help somewhere, say it got something not so great on Yelp and yeah, we don’t want to play in their sandbox anymore because they suck. But if you have some bad stuff on Yelp that you want to improve your overall rating or pointing your happy customers towards those places where they can really help you kind of refresh that reputation or increase that average star rating, that’s the really great opportunity of having a customized ask, right? You can say, okay, where do we need help? If you don’t need help anymore, then you absolutely use Erin’s tactic of where do we have the most eyeballs. But if you need help somewhere, that’s where you concentrate. Maybe you’ve got a bad review in Facebook and you want to get that rating back up again or you want to push that bad one down the page. Then you, you know, push more people towards Facebook kind of thing. So you can really, not only use this as a way to get feedback, but you can use it as a way to improve your overall reputation across any platform that you need help in, whether it’s, you know, something general like Google or Yelp or it’s something niche like Thumbtack or Angie’s list or something like that. So there’s different places where you can ask for help depending upon where the help is needed.

Erin: 09:55 Agreed. And if you have a user who’s not very savvy you know, I’ve worked with some clients who said, my customers are great about emailing me reviews, but for the life of me, I can’t get them to publish one, ask them if it’s okay if you use their words and put it into a little graphic and share it on your Facebook feed or on your website. You cannot publish to a review platform as someone else. So please don’t misconstrue what we’re saying here, but you can take a, you know, just make a little background in Canva and copy and paste their quote. You know, depending on your relationship with them, use their name or just put, you know, Mary G from Parker. But then you’re, you’re still sharing that Goodwill and you’re not just losing that just because it was put into an email or even a phone call,

Carrie: 10:45 Right? Or you can ask them for permission to publish it on your own website. You publish it in texts and your website, you Mark it up with good schema markup and you’ve improved your SEO. Now, your own domain is not eligible for stars in the search results anymore, but you’re still putting out to Google, Hey, we have really positive reviews on our domain. And not only that, like Erin said, you’re showing your customers that come to your website, you know, Hey, people love us. That’s all. Those are all good things for you to do. So, even if you’re not getting these reviews via you know, those third party sites, if they’re emailing them or they’re calling you or something like that, that’s a great way to repurpose those into something that can help your business instead of just letting it, you know, rot your inbox. Right. It’s not gonna help anybody there

Erin: 11:35 Content.

Carrie: 11:36 Yep. I know that

Erin: 11:37 There’s a lot of at least in our industry, there’s a lot of back and forth on if testimonials on your website do you any good? Because a lot of people feel like their game did not believable. It’s not going to hurt.

Carrie: 11:51 It’s certainly not going to hurt. And I think that even even from a, Oh, well, they published their own, they probably only publish the good ones. And that’s probably, you know, most businesses are going to do that. Who’s going to put a bad review on their own website? I mean, get real. But I think that the psychology behind how somebody feels when they hit their website, when the first thing they see is a positive testimonial, even though they may think, Oh, you know, that’s game or whatever, they may take it with a grain of salt. That language still changes their reaction to you as a brand. Right? Even if, if consciously they realize it may be crafted subconsciously, they have a more positive feeling towards you. So, you know, I still think it’s worth absolutely worth putting testimonials on your own website, especially if you can get, get them for your texts or your employees and put ’em on your employee pages. I think that those are really, really useful for people trying to make a decision on what business to use.

Erin: 12:59 Agreed. And especially if the sentiment of the reviews or the testimonials on your website matches the overall sentiment of reviews on third party sites. You’re again, closing that loop. So people are seeing the positive content on your website and maybe that’s what provokes them to go out and read a little bit more somewhere else. You know, even if they’re not quite sure if they’re buying internet that has them, then go to Google or you know, to next door or somewhere and check what people are saying about you in a social platform. And if the two meet up then you’ve got a lot more credibility.

Carrie: 13:34 Absolutely. And the flip side of that is if the two don’t meet up, you have a bigger problem, Erin immediately. So one tactic I really like is the face to face ask if you’re comfortable doing that. Some people aren’t and I get it. I am an introvert, believe it or not. And I do not like confrontational conversations, especially face to face. And so you know, opening yourself up to somebody saying, well, I’m not going to give you a positive review. That’s a big step. That’s can be very scary. And so I get not wanting to ask face to face if you’re not comfortable, but if you are it’s a really great tactic. Even if you’re setting the expectation, you know, maybe Jerry says to his customer, Hey, I’m, I really appreciate your business. I just want to prep you, you’re going to get an email in a couple of days asking for your feedback and I’d really appreciate it if you’d leave us an honest glimpse as to how we did for ya. Even just that verbal setting, that expectation prepares them for when they see that feedback request. Right.

Erin: 14:43 Absolutely. And don’t, you know, don’t be too heavy handed. You know, the way Carrie frames did is really great because she said an honest, not a positive review. I worked with a company recently and had wonderful customer service, customer service, excuse me, experience with them and what have left them a glowing five star review, but had three separate employees tell me quote unquote off the record that if they get anything less than five stars, they get in trouble. That made me really hesitant to leave a good review even though I had a fantastic experience because it made me question what that would do for my integrity because if they said it to me, they probably have said it to everyone that’s walked through the door. And now I don’t want to put my name among the people that may or may not being honest because they don’t want to get their sweet sales rep in trouble.

Erin: 15:34 I’m always, always, always push honesty. If you have more bad reviews than good, that is not a customer problem. That is a you problem and you need to fix that. If you’re doing what you should be doing and providing a great service, you shouldn’t be worried about your reviews, you know, every once in a while, yeah, you’re probably gonna get one that’s less than favorable. But consumers understand that and they actually find you more believable and relatable. If you have one or two bad reviews out of 30 or 40 then if you have all five star reviews because it’s just not really believable.

Carrie: 16:06 Well, and the sweet, what do they say? The sweet spot is like 4.6 to 4.8 or something like that. Like that’s the believable span. 5.0 people don’t believe them. They’re like, ah, you know that nobody gets 5.0 right. So, so, you know, don’t be a F, don’t chase five stars. That is not the point at all. But you know, chase, honest feedback and use that feedback to improve your business. If, if there is an issue it will become very obvious and that being no, go ahead. Go ahead.

Erin: 16:43 The people trust these reviews and if, if the reviews have good content and good information in them, like the customer thing that they enjoyed having Jerry out to install their water heater. About 84% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they would a recommendation from a friend. So don’t discount the value of these reviews. And also don’t discount the value of a great review. So that doesn’t mean, like Carrie said, it doesn’t have to be five stars. A great review can say, Hey, this started out Rocky, but these guys came through and they fixed it and I am so happy with them right now. You know, don’t shy away from the fact that we all have tough days and your employees are human and your customers are human. To figure out how to use that to, to your advantage to grow trust within your business or how you can turn things around to make it an even better experience for your customer.

Carrie: 17:35 For sure. Let’s talk for a minute about incentivizing like putting an incentive program in place. You mentioned before how that business you did, you worked with they were saying to all of their customers, Hey, if I get anything less than three stars, I get in trouble. You know, do you think they really get in trouble or do you think that that’s a tactic for them to get a bunch of reviews as part of an incentive program?

Erin: 18:01 Typically I would think the latter, but I had some communication with their corporate office and told them I had a great experience and the response was we expect nothing less than perfection. So I was a little surprised it was a luxury brand, so I wasn’t as surprised as I would have been if it had been target or something. But if you guys want to hear me go on a tear suggest incentivizing reviews or employees, I can not, cannot, cannot, cannot emphasize enough how bad of an idea this is. You know, offering to give your employees gift cards if they get so many reviews in a month, it’s just as bad of an idea as offering your customers a guest card for reviewing you.

Carrie: 18:46 Well, because they’re going to, that’s free cash. That’s free stuff. So what are they gonna do? They’re going to ask all their friends and family to leave reviews. They’re going to set up fake profiles and leave reviews and they’re going to laugh all the way to the bank and the internet

Erin: 19:00 Smarter than that people.

Carrie: 19:02 Yeah. so do you know, I, I’ve seen it work in a couple instances and very small offices with longtime employees that are very invested in the success of the company. Yeah. It worked pretty well in that case. But in a majority of the cases, it becomes this free for all of hot mess that costs more money to fix than you would ever make. Getting those extra reviews and bumping up your review count, you like it. I don’t think it’s worth it in any way, shape or form.

Erin: 19:40 No, and I think this was one of those situations where having good judgment you know, there’s always those, Oh, but what about, what about, what about yes. If you work at a restaurant and your mom is one of your regulars and absolutely loved your meatballs and she wants to write a review about how good your meatballs are, that’s fine because she has an actual customer who has eaten them. However, if you have a tiny little local business in Omaha, and 60 of your reviews are coming from Calgary it looks a little fishy. So make sure that you know what you’re chasing is authentic and really in both local and reputation. I find myself using that word a lot. If you are operating with authenticity and you’re interacting with your customers authentically and transparently, this is not something you should have to worry about.

Carrie: 20:36 For sure. I absolutely 100% agree. And I think, you know, the problem with incentive programs is it tends to create a natural velocity, right? So you run your program for 30 days, your review profile grows by 30 reviews in 30 days, and then you get one review a month for the next year. Like what does that show to the consumer or to a platform like Google? Like what, what does that tell them? That tells them you ran a contest. Exactly.

Erin: 21:10 Google operates on data guys. So don’t think that they’re not going to notice if you do something like this. You know, that’s kind of the same thing as publishing 67 blog posts in three days. They’re gonna know.

Carrie: 21:23 Well and you know, maybe they don’t do anything, but maybe something bad happens and you get a terrible review from an ex employee and then you need Google’s help to get it removed. But you have this great big red flag,

Erin: 21:36 Right? And they go, we don’t have some strange activity on your profile. Maybe that bad review has some validity.

Carrie: 21:41 Yeah. So I, you know, I think if you just like Erin said, come, come at it with an an attitude of complete authenticity. You know, you’re going to absolutely be better off in the long run. It’s gonna look more natural. It’s going to be natural,and you’ll get much more benefit out of it than, you know, something unnaturally. Uwhat’s the word I’m looking for? Bloated by a incentive program

Erin: 22:09 Now. And that’s not to say that it’s, it’s totally okay to have contents on your email signature or on your website or even in the lobby of your business that says, you know, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Please review us on TripAdvisor or, or you know, wherever your business is. That’s going to be a little bit more I don’t want to say dangerous, but a little bit more risky than asking personally because you don’t know who’s going to respond and what kind of experiences they’ve had where when you do that personal ask that Carrie mentioned, you probably have a pretty good idea of how their experience went. And if you don’t, then you have a whole different problem. But if if you know that they’ve had a good relationship with your brand, then it’s going to be a little bit more likely that you’ll, you can kind of expect what the outcome of their review is going to be. Or if you’re just blindly asking everyone, you’re playing a little bit more dangerous of a game

Carrie: 23:03 You are. But I think that that also lends into the credibility factor, right? If you only ask the people who are super, super happy, then you’re going to have that kind of weird snapshot of attitude towards your brand. So I don’t think it’s a bad thing to, you know, hand out a little card with every invoice that says, Hey, go here, go to this link. Put a short link on it or something and leave us a review and, and not, not throttle your ask by only asking the people you think are happy. You know, I, I would ask as many people as you can because that kind of leads into one of my next point is you need to keep track of who you’re asking and when you ask them and how many times you ask them. Because I think that one followup is okay.

Carrie: 23:52 Any more than that is annoying and you need to know your response rate. You need to know, so I need to ask X number of people to get one review so that you can kind of make a plan. If I need to ask 20 employees, 20 clients to get one review and I serve as 20 clients a week, then my review velocity, if I ask everybody is one review a week, that might be a lot. That might not be very much, but that’s what you have to be aware of, right? So you need to keep track and you need to understand how many people leave a review at the first ask and how many leave a review after this second ask so that you can understand, you know, what your customer’s behaviors are towards reviews and then you can use that information to kind of fine tune your ass, right?

Carrie: 24:44 You can kind of know what words resonate and what words don’t resonate. Maybe you change the subject line in the email and you got a lot more people to respond. When did you change that subject line? How do you keep track of that? One of the things that I really recommend is using a platform to help. There are really expensive ones and there are really affordable ones. I usually recommend GatherUp, which is one of the best on the market. They’re always innovating and if you need help or you don’t understand something, everybody that works there is very approachable. You could reach out to him on Twitter and say, I don’t get this and they’ll help you fix it ASAP. Like I’ve never had a problem with that. And they have really great features. Like they have this SMS ask feature where you can like send a text asking for a review and you can do it. Then then the customer could do it right on their phone and they have a text back feature as part of that. So you could actually start a conversation with your client via text, which is a great for building that that brand ambassador relationship, right?

Erin: 25:45 It isn’t, it’s a great opportunity to head off a potential problem before it goes public. Which you know, that’s one of the things that we’re going to talk about probably next week is once you get these reviews, what do you do with them? So I won’t dive into that right now. But what I do want to say is that you should be reading every single review you get. Not only to show you how, how the perception of your businesses, but you know, if you get five reviews in a week complaining about Jerry’s performance and typically he’s been a really great employee. This gives you an opportunity to salvage an internal relationship before things get bad as well. You know, maybe he needs some assistance. Maybe he’s working too much, maybe he is a terrible employee, but this, this kind of gives you an early warning system to check in with some internal issues before they get too blown out of proportion as well.

Carrie: 26:36 Absolutely. And I think that goes along with, you know, I kind of hate that adage, the customer always right, but the customer can really be kind of a barometer as to the health of your business if you’re doing the best that you can and they’re still not happy. Why? And, and does that mean that you need to change how you explain things or how you bill for things or you know, maybe you get what they’re doing, but the customer has no freaking clue what just happened, but they just had to pay a bunch of money for it, but they don’t have anything in their hand that explains what they got. You know, things like that. Sometimes that feedback can be used to improve your process and, and errors, right? You need to read every single review that comes in. In the end, you need to respond to every review that comes in. That’s next week’s topic. But I think that, you know, using what the community and what your customer community is saying about your business to improve your business, that’s an opportunity. Reviews are not something you should be afraid of. This is an opportunity for feedback from the best focus group you could ever get, which are the people that are actually buying and paying for your product or service. Right. Use that information.

Erin: 27:57 Yeah. Because your, your customer’s perception of your brand is not always going to be the same as yours. If it’s not aligning, you need to know why. You know, whether you need to, like Carrie said, change some of your messaging or if you need to go so far as to change the way you’re doing business. One unhappy customer is probably not worth completely upending your business. But if you’re consistently getting the same commentary and complaints you know, positive or negative commentary, if someone really loved that last time they came into your office, you had a bottle of water for them. Keep a case of water in the fridge, you know, that’s something that’s very inexpensive and, and it’s a personal touch that makes people feel valued. You know, candy dishes, little things like that that people notice. It’s not a huge deal, but you know, it can give them a smile and that fantastic if people are continually complaining that, you know, when the weather’s bad, water drips on their head when they walk in your door. Maybe you need to look at getting an awning or, or changing the way you have people come in. Little things like that will drive people crazy over time. So you know, if they’re already frustrated with something, that could be the final straw that just sets them off. So if you’re continually getting commentary in one direction or another, see how you can use that to benefit your brand or, or do better.

Carrie: 29:18 Yep. For sure. And so we have two points left and then I want to do a kudo, which we didn’t talk about ahead of time, but I think it’s a great one. So first of all, managing your online reputation and review program is not a job for an intern

Erin: 29:35 Or your daughter or your best friend or your neighbor who knows the internet really well.

Carrie: 29:41 So please

Erin: 29:42 Stop. And not to say there are not great interns out there and if this is an intern that’s been a Mark, like going to school for marketing and you know, this is right up their alley and, and they really get it, then maybe it is a job for an intern. But that’s probably pretty rare. This is not something that you do as an afterthought. This should be baked into your business plan. Right? Really, we just talked about how this is free market research. This is free consulting from your, your very targeted focus group. This should be a cornerstone of how you run your business. Definitely not an afterthought.

Carrie: 30:24 Yep. For sure. And then the last point, yeah, the last point I have to make is do not fake it. Do not write your own reviews. Do not pay for reviews. That is faking it. That is against the rules. You’re going to get busted somehow.

Erin: 30:38 Yeah. Whether it’s by the platform or by your users. A loss of integrity with your user community is going to cost you far more than you’re going to make off of a couple of fake reviews. So yeah, just don’t do it. If you want to see a consultant pet explode, go hire them and then tell them that all 50 of your reviews were created by your staff on the same IP address. Yeah. See how that goes.

Carrie: 31:01 Yeah. That’s kind of Erin’s head will will literally explode.

Erin: 31:09 You’d be entertaining for you. It would be a day runner for me. So

Carrie: 31:14 Eight,

Erin: 31:14 No, that ever comes from it.

Carrie: 31:16 Yeah, for sure. And, and you know again like I mentioned before if you’re faking your reviews and you need some help from that platform because something bad happens down the road, boy you better hope that your squeaky clean. Cause if they figure out you’ve been getting fake reviews or they’ve all been posted from the same IP address or even like in Sephora’s case they got busted because they actually put out an internal memo that showed people how to, how to game their IP address using a VPN to leave reviews for their own products. It wasn’t, so for us, sorry it was Sunday, Riley left a bunch of fake reviews on the Sephora website. So you know, don’t do that cause it will come out somehow.

Erin: 32:00 And if your user community finds out that you’re doing that, you know, one of the biggest comments I saw that really got my attention about this Sunday Riley story was that I talked to a couple people who love their products and they said, I’m still second guessing them. Even though I love my products because this is just, it’s really hard to buy into a brand that I can’t trust. So even if you don’t get busted by the platform, your user community will turn on you on a dime.

Carrie: 32:26 Yeah, absolutely. And so that’s probably our catastrophe. Don’t be like Sunday Riley. Right. But our kudo, I’m springing this one on Erin, our kudo is for lift today. I’m a loyal Lyft user because I will not use Uber, but

Carrie: 32:44 They just rolled out a new program. It’s called the Jobs Access Program. And so if you need a ride to a job interview, Lyft will give you a ride to a job interview for free. They’re in back and they’ll also take you to job training for free and they’ll take you to work and back for free for the first three weeks. You have your new job until you get your first paycheck and can work out your own, you know, vehicle bus pass subway pass, whatever, whatever that happens to be. So major kudos to lift for not only creating something really helpful you know, for their community, but, but doing it from a place of how can we help people not from a place of how do we get some good press, right? Yeah.

And so if you need a ride to a job interview, Lyft will give you a ride to a job interview for free. They’re in back and they’ll also take you to job training for free and they’ll take you to work and back for free for the first three weeks. You have your new job until you get your first paycheck and can work out your own, you know, vehicle bus pass subway pass, whatever, whatever that happens to be. So major kudos to lift for not only creating something really helpful you know, for their community, but, but doing it from a place of how can we help people not from a place of how do we get some good press, right? Yeah.

Erin: 33:35 Yes. And not only does it help the Lyft community, but it helps all of the communities that they’re working in because they’re getting qualified applicants to job interviews and to work that may not have otherwise been able to do. So, you know, stuff happens, cars break down, people fall on hard times. What a great way to get somebody back on their feet and to ensure, I mean, if, if that were me, I’m already a very loyal Lyft user, but this makes me want to use them more and professionally. If they had helped me out in this way, I just, I love that it, and it didn’t feel like you said it didn’t feel like they were doing this stuff. Their PR really felt like this was a, Hey, we’re doing really well. How can we, we provide a great community service

Carrie: 34:20 For sure.

Erin: 34:21 I’m really excited to follow this one because I think that it will do really, really well.

Carrie: 34:26 I hope so. And I think it’s, you know, it’s a way for them to help people across many different walks of life, right. From people who are struggling to, to even make it day to day to people who just, you know, had a blip in the radar and they need a little bit of help for a week or two kind of thing. I think that there’s so much opportunity to for this program to help lots of different people. And so kudos to lift for a really great idea, a really great idea. Thanks.

Erin: 35:01 I love it. I think about they’re doing great things and, and it’s really nice to see. The other thing that I kind of wanted to highlight since we’re talking about reviews is they didn’t take an opportunity to step on Uber while they were down when Uber was having a lot of really bad press. Instead of Lyft focusing on Uber shortcomings, they made themselves better. So that widens the gap, at least in my perception. And I know I pay attention to this a little bit more than the average consumer because it’s my, my life. But they, they didn’t say, Oh my gosh, these guys are awful, so go with us and we’re going to do any better than we need to because the other guy’s doing so bad. They said, okay, these guys are getting a lot of negative press. Let’s widen that gap so that we are top of mind and we are who people think about when they want help and, and it seems to be working, I don’t have numbers on their market share right now, but pretty much everyone I know in my relatively medium sized group of people usually.

Carrie: 36:01 Yeah, I would, I would agree with that. And that goes back to the point you were making before about you know, don’t step on your competitor when you’re down, but learn from what they’re doing wrong. Right? So if they’re doing something wrong and you have kind of the same practice but because it’s maybe an industry standard or whatever but they’re getting bad feedback about that, maybe it’s time for you to start thinking about a better way to do it. Right? Yeah,

Erin: 36:34 Absolutely. And if you really, if you have a good handle on your own review situation and you want to get really next level Ninja, start reading your competitors’ reviews and see where they’re falling short. And you know, maybe if you’ve got a competitor that’s getting, you know, eaten alive for having an uncomfortable waiting room, advertise your new chairs, you know, think of ways that you can grab the attention again by rising above the competition instead of stepping on them while they’re down.

Carrie: 37:03 Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that. So let’s wrap it up. Again, tune in next week cause we’re going to talk about how to deal with the reviews that you’ve gotten using all of the amazing tactics that we’ve shared with you this week. Don’t forget to subscribe by your favorite podcast platform and please, please, please share your feedback with us. We love to hear what you liked and didn’t like about what we had to say. We’re always open for discussion and improvement.

Erin: 37:31 Yes, thank you so much.

Carrie: 37:33 All right, we’ll see you next week. Everybody have a great one. Bye bye.

Outro: 37:42 Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe via iTunes, Google podcasts, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to sign up for reminders via the website, Community Karma, podcast.com. See you next time.