Creative Ways to Get More Testimonials for Your Computer Business

A significant number of customers rely on reviews and testimonials when deciding which computer repair shop or MSP provider to work with.

Beyond asking for testimonials by email or a link to Google My Business reviews, how can you get more of them? After all, it’s not long before reviews get stale, which makes them much less effective.

There are a number of creative ways you can obtain more testimonials to boost your business and add to your marketing assets. It just takes thinking outside the box and looking in places you may not have considered.

Tips for Finding More Reviews and Testimonials

Just like the torque in an engine, reviews are the power that fuel your marketing, conversions, and sales. A full 72% of customers won’t take action until they’ve read a company’s reviews.

But no matter how good reviews and testimonials are, they have a shelf life. There comes a time when people no longer consider a review relevant because it’s too old.

85% of consumers will only consider reviews written within the last three months.

This means that getting innovative about where to get testimonials is important. It allows you to keep a continual pipeline of fresh reviews for your I.T. business coming in to fuel your sales and marketing.

Here are several creative ideas for finding more reviews and testimonials.

Request LinkedIn Recommendations

An often overlooked but very powerful place you can gain testimonials for your business is through LinkedIn recommendations.

The recommendations process is attached to individual profiles, but if you’re the owner of your tech business, and request them from your clients through LinkedIn, it’s just as good as if they were posted to a company page.

You can do this in two ways:

• Go to the client’s LinkedIn Profile, click the “More…” icon and select “Request a recommendation”; or
• Click the “Me” icon and choose “View profile,” to go to your profile, then scroll to “Recommendations” and click “Ask to be recommended.”

You’ll be able to add a personal note to the recommendation request.

Create a “Customer Spotlight” Section of Your Website

Give your customers some free advertising and a link on your site in exchange for telling their story. If you just come out and ask for a case study or testimonial, that request could get put on the back burner because there’s nothing in it for them.

By creating a Customer Spotlight area of your website, you create an incentive for a client to tell you their story about interacting with your company. It becomes a win-win: you get a testimonial and they get free advertising.

Pro tip: Add that customer spotlight as a section to your company’s email newsletter too!

Enable Reviews on Your Facebook Business Page

There are 2.45 billion monthly active users on Facebook, and likely many of your customers are there to stay in touch with friends and family.

Enable reviews and use your business Facebook page as another channel to keep those reviews and testimonials coming in regularly.

Here’s how to do it:

• Go to your Facebook Page
• Click “Page Settings”
• Click “General”
• Under “Reviews” click the edit button and toggle them on

Search Local Citation Sites

There may be reviews out there that you don’t even know about on smaller directories (like Manta) and niche sites. This can be like finding buried treasure when you find a great testimonial that you didn’t even know about.

Check out our blog on local citations to find a listing of several sites to take a look at. While you’re looking at those sites, make sure your listing is updated and matches the information on your website to help boost your SEO.

Set Up Alerts that Look for Mentions of Your Company

Another way to find any testimonials out there on the world wide web that you may not know about is to set up some alerts. These save you the time of having to search for yourself and will email you if your name turns up on a Google search result or social media mention.

• For websites: set up a Google alert
• For social media: set up a social mention alert

Send a Post Support Survey

A survey is a great way to gather information about how a customer support job went and it can also be a way to capture a testimonial while you’re getting other valuable information.

There are some tips for creating surveys to ensure maximum participation, these include:

• Keeping it short (18% of people are more willing to take a survey that’s short)
• Don’t ask too many personal questions
• Make it easy for them to fill out either online or by email

Use a combination of short questions and also give them a box to add freeform comments.

Here is an example of some of the questions to include:

• How was your experience working with (Company)?
• How could your experience have been improved?
• Did this service help you achieve your goals? (If so, how?)
• Rate (Company)’s service on a scale of 1 to 5.

You can find more tips and examples of great customer surveys at Hotjar.

Note: For monthly MSP clients, send an annual customer satisfaction survey to give them an opportunity to input on what a great job you’re doing.

Do Follow Ups on Your Review Requests

If you have an automated email that requests a review when a service is complete, do you follow up with a call or message after that? Many business owners don’t, and it could mean they’re leaving a lot of reviews on the table.

Often, all it takes is a quick call, “Hi (Name), I just wanted to follow up to make sure you were happy with your service and that you received our review email.”

For those who aren’t quite comfortable with calling, you can send a personalized email follow up. Emails with at least one follow up email get about a 5% higher reply rate than those that aren’t followed up on.

Use a Thank You Card

With everything being digital these days, thank you cards are much less common in business than they were 25 years ago. You can stand out, show great customer service, and invite a testimonial all in one simple thank you card.

Create a page with a testimonial form on your site with a short URL that can be easily printed on a sticker and put that inside a thank you card. Then get in the habit of sending a personalized thank you card to customers and include that URL to invite a testimonial.

Going “old school” with snail mail can increase your chance of getting a review and being remembered for future tech needs.

Write Down Verbal Testimonials

How many times do you hear a customer say something like, “I really appreciate your fast support, you totally saved us!”? But since it’s not a written review, you just appreciate the compliment but don’t get any review mojo from it.

Take a few moments when a customer is complimenting your business in person or over the phone, and ask them, “Say, would you mind if I wrote up your great compliment into a short testimonial quote for our website? I’ll send it to you to okay first, of course.”

70% of customers are happy to give a testimonial if they’re asked. Many customers are just too busy to find a review site and do it themselves. Take the opportunity when it presents itself in conversation and you may be surprised how many customers not only agree but are appreciative that you’re saving them time.

Invite Input During a Webinar or Facebook Live Event

Doing a video event, whether it’s using Facebook Live or a live webinar, can not only give you the opportunity for lead generation it can also give you a new spin on testimonials.

For example, say you do a webinar for remote employees on 5 things they can do to increase IT security at home. You can invite comments during or after the webinar on how it helped and then use positive comments as testimonials in your marketing.

An example would be, “Tom was great and explained everything well. By the end of the session, I felt my work PC was much more secure.”

Testimonials about how you helped someone understand a tech issue during a webinar or Facebook Live can be just as powerful as those given specifically about a product or service that was purchased.

A few ideas for live video events you could do include:

• Home PC security for remote workers
• How to navigate Zoom/Skype for seniors
• Getting the most out of Microsoft Teams
• COVID-19 phishing scams and how to protect yourself
• Securing your online meetings with the right privacy settings

Take Advantage of YouTube Comments

If you have a video marketing campaign as part of your content marketing, make sure you upload the video on YouTube and have comments enabled.

Then be sure to tell people at the end of the video to please post their feedback in the comments. You can also include this instruction in your video description. While you may have to sort through a few “wise guys” that like to troll YouTube, you can also capture some great testimonial quotes from commenters.

Listen When People Say Great Things

People are often out there saying great things about your business that you aren’t aware of, unless you make it a priority. Get creative and watch your testimonials multiply.

What creative idea works best for you to get customer testimonials? Share your thoughts in the comments!