BugBux podcast recap: Building a flywheel of growth

AskNicely’s VP of Customer Success, Reagan Nickl, was a recent guest on the BugBux Podcast where he discussed how to turn your pest control (or any) business into one that drives growth through five-star customer experiences that result in positive reviews, referrals, and lifetime customers.  

Reagan joined the BugBux podcast host, Allan Draper, to chat through the five steps businesses should take when it comes to their feedback collection and implementing change. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch it here:

“Our stance is: focus on the customer base, how do you turn your existing customer base into a flywheel engine that drives reviews, testimonials, online endorsements that will drive new customers, and drive a whole other feedback loop for you and create lifelong, long retaining, high LTV, low CAC customers that grow your business over time,” Reagan said. 

So you don’t have to take notes while you listen, we distilled the five points Regan makes and how you can use that information to grow your business below. 

BugBux podcast recap: How to build a flywheel of growth

If your goal is to build a customer base that drives referrals and business growth, here’s how to get started.

Step 1: Collect feedback

Your first step should be collecting feedback from your customers, if you aren’t already. You should have a method for collecting feedback. “It could as simple as a suggestion box link on your website, or a prompt on an invoice that asks, ‘How are we doing?’” Reagan said.

“If you’re not collecting that feedback, you’re really in the dark,” he noted. Ideally, you should have a way to look at solicited feedback and non-solicited feedback, so you have a good idea of what customers are saying, and you have a constant flow of feedback coming in.

Step 2: Respond to customers 

Once you start collecting feedback, you need to actually respond to it. How you do this will vary, but Reagan recommends something automatic that’s always on and always running, rather than something manual that can be limited by one person’s time.

“AskNicely has a suite of tools that does this for you. We can take the feedback, AI can analyze the feedback, and can provide a daily report breaking down the themes and categories in a curated digest,” Reagan said. Then that feedback can be directed to the right teams to address it. 

This suite can notify team members of negative experiences immediately, so no customers fall through the cracks, and negative experiences can be turned into positive ones instead.

Step 3: Analyze feedback and how you can grow reviews

The next step is to take the feedback customers are offering, analyze it, and turn the feedback from those happy customers into online reviews and testimonials. Of course, this can be done manually, but with AskNicely, you can automatically ask customers to turn direct feedback into online reviews on the site of your choice.

Some of the biggest value can come from analyzing the poor experiences customers have had, improving it for the customer, and turning them into a promoter. Improving a negative experience can go a long way in turning a detractor into a promoter for many businesses. Plus, reviews that show your business is responsive to feedback and will work to make it right go a long way with potential new prospects.

Step 4: Train your techs to change

After receiving all of these reviews and sifting through them all, you’ll need to start making some changes. By the time you identify a trend, it could be too late; instead, taking feedback and automatically sharing it with the relevant teams is more effective. AskNicely’s AI Insights can help identify the top techs and service scores to show who stands out and what they’re doing that’s moving the needle. 

Those insights can be used in meetings, trainings, and beyond to help other teams make improvements from one customer to the next, without a delay. “Having this infrastructure in place is a great way to automatically do that and train your people in spite of all of the stuff you have going on throughout the day,” Allan Draper said.

Step 5: Grow your business

Once you’ve completed all the steps above, you’ll be in a position to start growing your business. The leaderboards will show techs where they rank, creating some friendly competition that results in better customer experiences, more positive online reviews and testimonials, and a better online reputation overall. AskNicely can then help show where your business is ranking compared to competitors and beyond, and recommend Focus Areas to improve further. Ultimately, creating a flywheel of growth for your business. 

Transforming your business into a growth machine

“For so long, software like AskNicely has been miss-categorized. People think we're just like Qualtrics or just like SurveyMonkey. But SurveyMonkey stops at the survey, Qualtrics stops at the insight. Our big differentiator is that we focus on the employee, because they’re the key to your business growth. Why not invest in your biggest asset to get the best experience?” Reagan said. Your employees are the key to unlocking the highest quality experiences for the customer, and in turn, growing your business.

Pest Control business owners can join the BugBux Facebook group, and those interested in AskNicely can book a demo here.