Conventional wisdom tells us not to trust strangers, but in practice, we do it all the time. In fact, their opinion matters a lot—on Yelp, Google, OpenTable, and beyond. A recent survey showed that nearly 90 percent of consumers read reviews of local businesses, 57 percent will only buy from businesses with four or more stars, and consumers read an average of 10 reviews before trusting a business.
While one negative review can put a dent in your small delivery business, lots of positive reviews do wonders: a one-star increase in a restaurant’s average rating on Yelp leads to roughly a 9 percent increase in revenue.
There are lots of strategies to increase the quality and number of your online reviews (such as responding to complaints directly by commenting) but one of the best ways is to get the fundamentals right: provide a great customer experience.
If that sounds daunting, here’s the good news: If you’re using the right delivery management software, great customer experience is built in. Here are four ways that GetSwift’s delivery software feeds right into customer experience and will have your business getting positive review after positive review. We’ve seen this happen for small businesses across industries—from restaurants to cannabis to furniture. Here you go:
1. Transparency. One of the most frequent calls or complaints a delivery business gets is, “Where’s my delivery?” You can solve that by giving your customers a live tracking map live ETA, and SMS alerts, all automatically provided with GetSwift’s delivery software. The benefits to customers are enormous: they won’t need to call you anymore, they can plan their schedule around the delivery, and they get notified of any delay in advance. This clear, crisp delivery experience is so refreshing to customers—especially compared to the all-day delivery windows they get from some providers—that it leads to glowing reviews.
2. Fast Response Times. With the right delivery tracking software, your operations team can spot potential hiccups before they arrive—right from one easy dashboard. If a delivery is going to be late, you have that pop on right on your dashboard, meaning you can alert the customer before it happens. Why would a customer give you a bad review if you reached out to solve the problem before it affected them? If anything, they’ll go on Yelp or Google to write about how you turned a negative to a positive.
3. Fast Delivery. For most deliveries, especially in online food delivery, speed is a big part of what’s going to make customers happy. But you can’t get faster relying on the same old technology, where you are calling and texting your drivers to find out where they are before giving them an assignment. Once you adopt delivery software, your fleet won’t magically drive faster. But, you will save time at every stage—dispatching times go down, routes are cleaner, drivers waste less time—and all of a sudden you have the opportunity to cut delivery times by 35 percent. The result is customer happiness.
4. Happy Drivers. Speaking of drivers, happier drivers mean happier customers. One human interaction can, of course, make someone’s day. If your drivers are stressed out and don’t know where in the city they’re headed to next, or who will be complaining to them because they’re late, the quality of those interactions goes down. On the other hand, drivers on the GetSwift app for courier drivers have a simple interface to view their upcoming routes and all their drop-offs, the system automatically sends SMS notifications to customers so drivers don’t have to, and safety features like proof of delivery mean drivers always have transparency if something goes wrong. It all adds up to more relaxed drivers and customers more likely to leave great reviews.
In sum, if you’re looking to boost your online reviews, it’s a good time to take a look at the delivery experience you’re providing. If you really nail it—something that we’re here to help you do—you’ve just satisfied customers before they’ve even experienced your product, and the reviews may just come pouring in.
If you’d like to learn more about how to get started with GetSwift’s delivery software for small businesses , give us a shout.