Reputation Is Your Wealth

by

April 26, 2019

“Reputation is your wealth.” – Rashaad Bajwa

Rashaad Bajwa is the founder and president of Integris, ApprenticeIT, and Bizratings.com/360score.me.

Secret to Success

We found that the real secret to our success was the performance that we did for our existing clients and the word of mouth referrals that we got. So we knew at an early phase that the potential for our success was in our own hands and in the reputation that we were building in the eyes of our clients. Using them as references.

Reputation is critically important for small businesses like Integris to not only get clients, but to evaluate who we want to work with like staff, vendors, etc. Rather than allow the reputation to trickle out, we found it advantageous to create a mechanism where we could put a bullhorn around that reputation and spread it with the outside world.

Our motto was, if you are an exceptional provider don’t keep it a secret, let the world know.

Out of that, BizRatings was born. We knew that if we asked our clients what they thought of us, that would be the best way for us to know who we are and what their experience would be. At BizRatings we help companies broadcast their reputation through the eyes of their clients through Customer Satisfaction Surveys and share those insights with the world.

Our first, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), was a fax and we got a really good response rate. Our reputation, this thing that had been hidden in our client’s head, had become the best marketing we could ever have, after putting it out in front of people. Now we don’t use faxes, but as a service or ticket is completed, the user who experienced the service gets an e-mailed customer satisfaction survey to complete. To rate their experience and how we did. They score on a 1-10 scale with comments. Good or bad comments both need to be acted on.

If a client is unhappy with you, it is now your opportunity to win a client for life.

The reality is, the clients who went through 9/11 or Hurricane Sandy with us are the clients we have for life. They know when something went south, this is the quality of the partner I have. These CSAT surveys cannot be ad hoc or done whenever you feel like it, it needs to be with every transaction. With laser focus on these surveys, your customer knows how much you care about them and want them to feel like they are getting the right service.

If they really love you, not only is it a good pat on the back for you and your staff, but it is also really good marketing. We give companies on the BizRatings platform the ability to turn these responses into Google Reviews, which are one of the most significant data points for organic search engine results. The key for a 60% response rate – send out the survey within 24 hours of the service being completed and follow-up again if there is no response on the first attempt. The most important is your behavior on their responses. You have to answer to both positive and negative responses to reinforce the action of responding to a survey.

If you want to get the leadership at Integris to jump, there is no better way than to give us a bad BizRatings review.

With every transaction there is a human tied to that transaction, so when someone is providing feedback about DCS (Integris) they are also providing feedback about that individual’s performance. Over time, each individual member of DCS has an individual reputation in the eyes of the client. The organization’s reputation is basically the cumulative reputation of all of the individual contributors.

“There is no world where Integris is amazing and our staff suck, or, where we have amazing staff and everyone hates Integris.” Integris is a professional services business. We don’t have a patent on some special widget, we don’t sell a special version of Microsoft Windows server. This is about our people, our processes, and it’s about our reputation.

What is the ROI you have seen for business on the BizRatings platform?

We are in a brave new world when it comes to reputation and the different data points that are available online now. With customer reviews in certain industries like restaurants (Yelp/Opentable) and hotels (TripAdvisor), they are ahead of the curve on this compared to the professional service industry. We don’t even buy a phone case without looking at a review for a $20 product. To think that you are going to do business with a professional service firm for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands dollars without looking at review sounds insane, but the reality is that there is just not that much content out there right now.

Our clients are seeing a huge benefit of being early adopters of this technology. For instance if you are a staffing firm and you start getting google reviews, many of your competitors may not have them yet or very few, you will automatically set yourself apart from the pack in the eyes of your potential clients and Google. Whether you believe in Google reviews or not, Google’s search algorithm does and it prioritizes based on the feedback on their platform.

Benefits of 360score.me

1. We all know that we as individuals have a reputation within the organization with all of our colleagues, bosses, etc.

2. How you take care of a client, how you behave in a client’s eyes is important, but it’s not everything.

3. How you behave, how you interact, with the rest of the people on your team is significant as well, if not more important.

4. The closer your teammates are to you, the more important and accurate their feedback is. So if we can give folks a mechanism (software) to point out what is working well and where they need to improve, they can find out and work on the blind spots they may have and improve the relationship they have with their employees.

We were always doing the traditional reviews with supervisors and even some reverse feedback. But we came to the point where your reputation is not just what your supervisor thinks of you, it is the cumulative of what the team thinks of you. Not just how nice you are, but also your work product and culture fit within the organization.

How do I get started with 360score.me?

1. Subscription- Subscription basis to use the tool on a scheduled or consistently.

2. Skip Level Surveys- Managers get to evaluate managers.

3. Company Happiness Surveys- Employee survey to see where the organization stands as a whole.

4. One-time Survey

To learn more about Rashaad, visit him here on LinkedIn.

 Listen to Rashaad’s full Discussions by Integris podcast episode on Monday, April 29th.
Nia Morris is a Senior Marketing Specialist for Integris.

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