078: Understanding the Metrics of Reviews with Josh Kelly

Josh Kelly is the Co-Founder of RevuKangaroo, the world’s leading reputation management system, an automated SAAS business that has helped generate countless reviews for businesses on places like Google, Yelp, Facebook and more as well as growing actual revenue for clients, sometimes in the tens of millions of dollars.

 

Before devoting his work fulltime to RevuKangaroo, Josh had an extensive background in marketing, working at companies like Bonneville international, Parker and Sons, Dial (DMG) Inc and Clover Marketing.

 

He helped his own family business, a local heating, cooling, and plumbing company in Phoenix, grow from $7 million in revenue to over $100 million in just over 14 years and he has been featured on stages with the Zig Zigler Foundation, Dave Yoho and EGIA as well as major platforms like CBS, Fox, and NBC.

 

Questions

 

• Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey?
• Could you share with us how you think customer experience is going to manifest an grow over the next 5 to 10 years versus where we’re coming from in the last 5 to 10 years.
• Could you share with us how do you stay motivated everyday?
• Can you share with us what isone online resource tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business or even your personal life?
• What are some of the books that have had the biggest impact on you either in a professional capacity or a personal capacity?
• Could you share with us what’s one thing that’s going on in your life right now that you are really excited about – either something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people?
• Where can our listeners find you online?
• During times of adversity or challenge is there a quote or saying that you have that kind of helped you to refocus or just to get back on track so that you can feel energized towards what you’re working on?

 

 

Highlights

 

• Josh shared that it's kind of a weird story, like everyone thinks he did this purposely, but he didn't. He kind of tripped into reputation management truth as he has tripped into most jobs and most businesses he has owned literally, it was a problem he had with his own business; with clients he was already working with. He works in what he would consider a grudge industry for the most part meaning like a plumber, no one wants to do business with a plumber, no one's excited to see a plumber, you only see a plumber when something's gone wrong and there's water all over your floor. And it's not a positive experience no matter what no matter how great a job you do, you could save the day but you're still walking into a bad experience and because of that it's really hard to get good reviews. No one's excited to do business with you, no one's happy that they did business with you ultimately. So, it was an issue he had, it was an issue a lot of clients he worked with had and he tried to buy it, a system, he tried to hire consultants, he tried to hire software and he couldn't find anything that actually worked. So, he went to a partner of his who was a good back then who runs a large team. And he (Josh) essentially explained the issue, what's going on, he literally locked a whole bunch of business owners he knew and good friends within a room and they started spit balling ideas what it could look like, what it should look like and been running ever since.

 

Yanique shared, so, it's fair to say then that you ended up in this business because of a pain point that you were experiencing, and I mean I'm sure many of our listeners, this will connect with them. Generally speaking, people typically end up in an entrepreneurial position many times because of some pain or discomfort that they felt that they could definitely find a solution for and of course a solution for other people who were experiencing the same pain and discomfort.

 

Josh agreed, literally, in their business like the plumbing HPC company is his first business. They were working their butts off to get reviews and to be positive and they have won awards, they've been recognized by Congress, they won the BBB Torch Award for Ethics, they were doing amazing quality customer service and great work but they were getting like 10 to 12 reviews a month and they're turning hundreds of calls. Now he gets 10 to 12 reviews a day and all are positive, it's totally transformed the business because it doesn't really matter as weird as it sounds you can have amazing customer service, you can have an amazing product, you can have amazing system, you've got amazing software, and if no one knows about it, it doesn't really matter that much. So, they had to find a way to let people know about it and the best way to do that right now is reviews.

 

Yanique reiterated, so, you were saying that you ended up in the reputation management business and it's not very easy.

 

Josh agreed and stated that it's easy now that they have a system and they have software to follow it and they have really simplified procedures it's really almost fully automated. Now, they have ton of reviews and they literally get millions of reviews a month for clients, all positive, driving them out to third party sites like Google, Yelp, Facebook, depends what business that you're in and actually literally driving real revenue and real customers to you. So, now it's easy but it took a long time to get there, not like a month of development work, he’s talking years of development work and then years of refining and then talking to clients and figuring out, so it was not an easy path but now, if you join your RevuKangaroo, it's pretty turnkey. It's pretty simple, pretty fast and their average client grows about 18 percent in revenue with the first six months in the program specifically from them.

 

Yanique stated. So, this particular platform organizes your customers reviews of individual employees and pushes positive reviews to major websites and those websites include Google Plus, Yelp Facebook, Twitter and more. So, pretty much if I let's say I wanted to visit a restaurant that I'd never heard of before that maybe I was out and somebody said, “Oh, there's a new Mexican restaurant that opened up on X street,” and I decided to go on Google and I saw like a Google review, your platform allows that restaurant to be able to have people rate their restaurant to get a good Google percentage rate.

 

Josh agreed and stated that that's the way consumers work right now. So, if you're to go to a restaurant or a hotel or hire a service, the vast majority of people about 87% of people look you up online beforehand. That's the current statistics it's actually growing. And the first thing they look at is reviews, actually 87 percentage people that looked at your reviews. So, restaurants are a great example. If you've never been to a restaurant and you're trying to find a specific type of restaurant, most people are going to google it and or go on Yelp depending on where you're located in the world and look at the reviews. Now here's the problem with that system as a business if you just allowed it to happen. Customers are fickle, they just are, if you had a really great experience at a restaurant and the food was really good that's what you're supposed to do. So, it's actually pretty hard to get positive reviews, however, if you've made a mistake which happens, if someone had to wait or the spice level was off on that dish or whatever it is, any single dish that can happen. It's way easier to get negative reviews and it's just a hard thing, like you have to drive a lot of reviews for it to really make a difference too. If you're a restaurant and you've got 15 reviews that doesn't make him feel really comfortable, he’s sure you're the same way. So, it's a numbers game too. So, what they've essentially done is if you need reviews on Google what they're going to do is they create an online funnel for you on your website. They automatically email and text message all of your customers asking how your service was and they actually tie it just like you said to a team member. So, what he means by that, if you're a restaurant, they're actually going to write a review on your server or maybe a bartender and the reason they do that is it tends to skew a lot more positively and they get way more feedback. It's really hard to get a review on the ambiance of a restaurant or how nice the tablecloths are or whatever. It's much easier to get review on, Jennifer the server because you had a relationship, you talk to them, good or bad right. And they say, “Hey, how is your service with Jennifer from 1 to 5 stars?”If it was an amazing experience they automatically drive it out to those third party sites, they pre populate the stars, they make sure it's landing where they can actually drive business for you. They had a bad experience instead of right now them going out to Google and become a permanent mark on your business, they're instead going to collect that customer's information, find out exactly what happened, find out which team member it happened with and send it to the management team and say, “Hey, this customer had an issue with this team member, here's exactly what happened, why don’t we reached back out to them, make it right.”

 

So, you're getting a chance to recover that negative experience before it kind of firestorms and gets out of control.

 

Josh agreed, and here's what happens, let's say that customer you turn around and now has an amazing experience, if that one-star review is out on Google, good luck changing them. The truth is that customer totally turned around now loves your business, it happens all the time but that one-star reviews stays there and other people they're looking up your business, they don't get the context to that, they don't get to find out that you turned around amazing service or that was a one off or was a weird experience or that's not normal. All they see is a one-star and a bad description. So, it's really important that you take control of your online reviews because the truth is your online reputation is happening with or without you. The customer is in control and they should be, but he thinks you should have a say in it. If there was a bad experience, he would want to know about it and he wouldn't want it to be permanent, if he could fix that and turn it around then leave him a review then. And truthfully, if they had a really bad experience and then you followed up with them and the customer hates you even more because you did a really bad job of following up then that's understandable, then ok maybe this isn't a one off, maybe this is just a bad business. Then it's going to show up on Google anyway, but for so many businesses they do great business and they're great people with great products or services and you look them up online and it just doesn't show it and he doesn't think that's fair.

 

• Josh shared that he has been in entrepreneur more or less right after college. He has always been in the customer experience business. Anybody who tells you differently like they just don't understand. He guesses there's some commodities like if you're selling spoons, customer service is probably not, and customer experience is not as big a deal. He has never been in a commodity business where he’s selling widgets or spoons or toothpicks or whatever it is where it's just price conscious and nothing else matters. He has always been in service or product businesses where having a good product, having a good service, having great experiences is very important. As far as where it's going, he thinks they're a perfect example of exactly where it's going. There was a time where people spoke to each other face to face, you get to learn what businesses were good for referrals and you talked to your mother about company before you hire them, you called friends, that doesn't really happen anymore. What's happening is your customer experience is moving almost entirely digital, more and more and more there's businesses that are holding out from this and some will always hold out, a lot won’t. So, a good example would be like their customer service experience if you were to join RevuKangaroo, you are going to get a constant touch points always from them and it's an automated system they're reaching out to you by email, by text message but they're checking, it's a combination you can go too far where hey it's only automated and you're like a software company or everybody's dealt with those phone calls where you call in to a robot, he doesn't like that, that's bad. However, he does love the customer experience where you're calling in and they have the menu and that kind helps short cut what you're going to talk about depending on the business or everyone's had that service where you press 5, if we want if you want them to call you back when it's your turn. He thinks that improves the customer experience significantly, you're not sitting there waiting on hold annoyed as annoyed anyway. And that's like an automated system that's drastically improves the customer experience, it's all about automating what you can, handholding what makes sense and then bridging the gap between the two and really, it's also about setting expectations. So, a good example is like when you join RevuKangaroo or do business with Parker and Sons as the home service company or Clover Marketing or Pulse or any of those businesses he’s a part of. Let's say I know on day three for RevuKangaroo, people tend to ask where can I see reporting on email and text messages that are set up so, he knows that they've had a system of this, he knows it comes up often enough, so, day two at the end of the day he sends out an email with a video walking through exactly how they pull that and letting them know if they have any questions let him know, that's proactive customer experience and customer service. So, he thinks the automation side of it and the handholding needs to be combined and he thinks that's the way things are going and he’s actually really excited. Obviously, he’s in that business but even if he’s not, every business should be in that business.

 

Yanique shared, it's interesting you mentioned a little bit of digitization and a little bit of humanization and how I ended up in this business of doing podcasting was, I am a customer service trainer, that's what I do for a living. And so, I figured podcasting would be a great platform for me to reach more people and build more awareness around customer experience but one of the things I've found over the years is I really don't think people are going to want that fully digitized experience at some point. They still want to deal with another human being. I think technology is great and it does definitely help to accelerate the process to make things much easier, it definitely makes your life more convenient freeing your time to do the things that clearly brings you closer to your goals. But for some things especially when you're feeling a pain like as you said there is a plumbing situation or your cable breaks down or there is an issue with your kid at school, you will have to have some interaction with another human being. How do you see that manifesting with this whole digital revolution with chat bots and everybody trying to technologize their businesses? But at the same time as you mentioned still handholding and having that human element in the business that people still feel like they're not a transaction but they're a person.

 

Josh stated that he actually thinks this really kind of depends on your business and your industry. Like he said if you're selling spoons you could pretty much automate stuff. A school is a great example, like that's a personal thing, it's important. That would be in his opinion really horrible to digitalize, that's much more handholding than most others. You could make the argument, “Hey, you could put kids in school, and you make them watch videos and that's consistent.”But he doesn’t think anyone wants to do that. But some people think of business like that, and they shouldn't. He thinks digitizing and systemizing and automating is a beautiful, wonderful tool and he thinks more and more people should use it. He thinks it's like any new technology though, what's going to happen is people are going to overuse it at first, they're going to get excited about it, they're going to go too far which is kind of what people are starting to do now. And then once they go too far, they realize, “Hey, that was too much,”and they'll start dialing back. A good example is like smartphones, everybody loves and uses a smartphone almost across the world. Children are given smartphones now at a young age, he didn't have that technology when he was growing up of course. But now like it was essentially they gave them the phone and they have free access, now parents are very aware of what's happening on their kids phone or more so, they're more restricted, they have hours that they're allowed to be on their phones and they’re not, they're adjusting backwards right and realizing a natural balance, everything works in balance. So, he thinks short term, he thinks more and more businesses are going to move towards automation as a way to save money and then over time they'll move back from the automation some to improve their customer experience.

 

Yanique agreed and stated that everything should be done in balance because at the end of the day we're still human and connectivity is so important. As you mentioned earlier because I'm the mother of a 13 year old and you're right, you give them the phone and you give it to them with no restrictions, no boundaries are set when the phone was presented to them but then over time you recognize that the phone is not taking precedence over the things that will really help them to be more successful. So, now you have to put boundaries in and clearly Apple realized that because they created Screen Time where parents can no shut the phone down, shut down their accessibility to certain apps without even having to have that interaction with the child because they would be on an app or a playing a game and at 9 o'clock the phone shuts down, it's bedtime because failing that you can tell them to shut the phone off but unless you're going to stand over them physically, how do you know that when you close that bedroom door and going to your room to sleep that they're really shut the phone off and they're not playing that game. So, balance is very, very important.

 

• When asked how he stays motivated, Josh stated that it depends somewhat but he’s a little different than most people. A lot of people are motivated by money, there was a time, fairly recently, within the last few years; he has heard this like a thousand times, he’s sure you've heard it too. But if you chase money, you become its slave, if you let money chase you, it becomes your slave. He really didn't fully understand that until probably a couple, maybe three years ago. So, he’s not really driven by money really at all anymore, he’s driven by helping people. So, his biggest goals in life are really to help other people achieve things that they couldn't do without him, that's his Why. That could mean team members buying a house they never thought they could afford, taking that trip that they always wanted to, buying that new car that they always want and it could be clients sending their kids to college and being able to more comfortably afford it or be able to retire earlier, that could really depend a lot on who he’s talking to but what motivates him is changing the world is such a broad thing, what does that mean? He could change in the individual people's lives in a significant way every day. And that's what excites him and gets him up in the morning and it's why he does everything.

 

• Josh shared that his business, he’s a big fan of having a CRM, he uses HubSpot, he uses it every day. He’s ridiculous with it, he loves it. He doesn't think Hubspot is the end all be all. He thinks you just have to find a way to organize yourself, your team, your customers in a way that makes sense. So many times he sees businesses and they don't have a CRM and he instantaneously like, how much money and effort and everything you’re leaving on the table, always have a system set up. Some cool systems he uses regularly, Grammarlyis a big deal to him. There is some really cool YouTube stuff if you're posting YouTube. Hemingway Appis amazing if you write any scripts or copywriting, it's a really, really cool app. He would suggest everybody who writes. So, he writes a lot of copy, he writes scripting. He helps people build websites, design emails, text messages Hemingway app is such a cool app. There's a lot of technology he uses every day like he’s in a software business so, he’s probably over the top with software compare to most. But he's sure he could list all day if he wanted to, but he doesn't know if there's one that everyone should be using this. He doesn't think there's a silver bullet for anything in life. It depends on what you're looking for, where you're at, where your business is at, where your personal lives at. It really, really depends, the only one he does suggest everybody be doing is reading books and he doesn't actually read books, he hates reading but he’s done a business book a month since he was 15, he uses Audibleevery day.

 

• Josh shared that the first business book he has ever read, the first he considered is like self-help books pretty similar to business books or personality books he kind of lumped them all as business books because he thinks it applies. The very first book he has ever read is the classic of all classics How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, he literally lives his life to that book more or less. It's an amazing book. If you're looking for sales, he loves Jordan Belfort Way of the Wolf: Straight line selling: Master the art of persuasion, influence, and success, it's an incredible book, it talks about tonality anchoring, some really cool stuff that's helped him not only sell but speak from stage and connect better with people. Know Your Why: Finding and Fulfilling Your Calling in Life by Ken Costa,it's an incredible book. And then Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, that's a really interesting, cool book too for a business owner if you own a business or run the team, Extreme Ownership is a very cool book, it's a book written by Navy SEALs. If you read that or not it's pretty amazing.

 

• Josh shared that there's a lot he’s excited about and it just really depends. He’s not this gigantic goal person, he doesn't think that way, he thinks of goals like a ladder. So, he needs things he needs to reach up and be able to grab and pull himself up, he’s not this big audacious goal guy where he wants to conquer this gigantic thing, that's just not how he works, he just keep climbing and eventually he gets there. So, for him the thing he’s really excited about is just helping individual people, he talks to business owners literally every day, there's a chance when you call on RevuKangaroo you'll get his team for the most part but you can get him and he loves having conversations with people and sometimes when you get an outside perspective and you can see things more clearly and sometimes those 15-20 minute, hour conversations, he could change the whole business, he could change the whole perception. That's what really excites him, it's not like he has this brand-new software that they're building, yeah, they're building really amazing software that he’s excited about but that's like a way for him to help people. So, the helping people is what actually excites him.

 

Yanique mentioned which dovetails back into the things that motivate you when you mentioned it's all about helping your people to grow and develop and help them achieve their goals and if they're able to do that then you feel like you've been motivated and it kind of pushes you forward to go on to the next day.

 

• Josh shared listeners can find him at –

[e-mail]

Facebook – Josh Kelly

LinkedIn – Josh Kelly

 

• Josh shared that there's not necessarily a quote and there's probably a series of quotes and depends what it is. For a business owner, he has a good friend named Ellen Royer, she's actually really, really amazing and a great speaker too who once told him that, “Businesses are like vehicles.”So when his business becomes overwhelming he thinks about that business are like vehicles and what that means is, a business you could sell, you could drive your vehicle, you could sell your vehicle, you can abandon your vehicle, you aren’t your vehicle. So, if that business fails, it doesn’t mean you are a failure it just means that business fail. So, putting some context and perception into that actually helps him a lot. It helps him that nothing that he does is an emergency, no one dies if they don’t get enough reviews today, that’s just not how it works. He’s not a doctor, he’s not working in an emergency room, things he does aren’t emergencies and when he puts that in context it helps him a lot both personally and professionally. Another one he uses all the time is, “I don’t sweat the small stuff,”and in context, it’s all small stuff.

 

   

Links

 

• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Way of the Wolf: Straight line selling: Master the art of persuasion, influence, and success by Jordan Belfort
• Know Your Why: Finding and Fulfilling Your Calling in Life by Ken Costa
• Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink