The GetFiveStars Customer Spotlight will periodically highlight one of our customers to find out why their business chose our customer feedback platform, what they like about it, product suggestions, the results and more. We’ll ask a handful of questions and their answers will be posted un-edited.
For our first customer spotlight we talked with Andy Sands, the owner of Good CitiZEN Dog Training – Suncoast Florida. Andy is a certified dog trainer operating in the Bradenton and Sarasota areas of Florida. Let’s get to it!
1. How did you come across GetFiveStars?
I was very unsatisfied with the current marketing platform I was using. The platform was an “all in one” type of setup that included email marketing, review collection, ‘SEO’, and social media marketing. Needless to say, it was highly disappointing, so I began researching other platforms that might do the same thing. As I was researching I found that every company that basically did the same thing; “all in one” was mediocre at best in doing so. Therefore, my best bet was to get a separate platform for each. Find a company that did one thing, and did it well. I began researching some of the review platforms including Reputation.com and Trustpilot.
I was very discouraged after discussing things with them because the price commanded was too much for our budget at the time. They had what we needed, but it was too expensive. So I began more searching, and came across GetFiveStars. Simple and basic; and able to do everything I wanted it to do, but most importantly affordable. I signed up for the free trial to see if I could make sense of it, and sent the info to our web developer to help, and after testing it out, decided it made a lot of sense to use GetFiveStars.
2. How easy or difficult did you find the set-up process of our system?
The initial setup was fairly easy. The difficult part for me was determining how to get it onto our website, or integrated into Facebook, etc. Upon some searching, I found the userguide for web developers, and got our developer involved. He understood everything in there and how to structure it. So from that point on it was a breeze.
3. Tell us about how using GetFiveStars has improved your business to date?
When clients do a search and come across our company they see highlights of the reviews from our website. In addition, once they click on the website, a preview of the reviews is on the sidebar so it stands out. Most clients that have found us on a search engine that didn’t hear about us before state that the number one reason they chose us was because of all of the positive reviews we have.
Good CitiZEN displays over 70 customer testimonials on their website with the GetFiveStars widget.
4. What is one thing about our product that stood out the most in using it?
It’s really pretty easy to solicit reviews by email, and send people links for reviews. In addition, the widgets can be customized for my website, which makes everything appear seamless.
5. What advice would you pass along to another business owner considering using GetFiveStars?
I would say do it for sure. You are not going to find another platform that is this complete for the money.
6. How important are reviews to your potential customers? Any stories or instances to share on where a customer has cited that your testimonials or online reviews influenced their decision to use you?
Reviews are extremely important to potential customers. The dog training industry is not regulated, so there is a wide variety of methods used, as well as people that are not certified or licensed. By showing reviews and testimonials we are able to let people know that we are legitimate professionals, who are the best around.
Every customer who has found us using a search engine has mentioned that their deciding factor has been the number of positive reviews that we have compared to our competitors.
Reviews for Good CItiZEN Dog training on Thumbtack.com
Thanks Andy for taking the time to share your experience with GetFiveStars and congrats on making so many 4 legged and 2 legged customers so happy. We appreciate the positive feedback and also can see we need to think about making the User Guide extremely visible to new customers and making sure our website testimonial widget installation is as easy as possible.
Stay tuned to our Customer Spotlight series for future client interviews.
