Customer Reviews: How Smartpress Maintains a High Rating

So what’s the big deal? Why are customer reviews king? It’s pretty simple and straightforward. Reviews give our customers confidence in their buying decisions and offer full transparency to our brand. As a customer-focused online printing shop, that’s imperative.

All reviews are effective: Positive ones provide guidance and invite our customers to feel good about their purchase. Negative reviews provide us learning opportunities. When our customers call out pain points, we grab hold of that chance to change a process or modify a product. Trust us, we take the time to work through any opportunity to improve your printing experience!

At Smartpress, we’re proud to have an extremely high overall rating for our products. We’ve also achieved the holy grail of having a high rating on Google. Simply put, our ratings prove we’re the gold standard of where you want to go to print.

Hint: Ordered a Smartpress product or used our online printing services and want to leave a review? Keep an eye out for prompts after you place an order and a follow-up email after your order ships. Missed the email? You can go straight to the product page and leave your review there, too.

Why does Smartpress consistently maintain a high Google rating?
Matt Chapman: “I believe there are three key elements to maintaining a high rating for any business. First, you need to offer a high-quality product or service at a reasonable price. The second aspect involves providing a ‘real person’ customer service approach at every step of the buying and ordering process. The third is to offer multiple avenues for customer feedback, ratings and reviews.

“Beyond the Google reviews, we ask for customer feedback through a broad customer satisfaction survey, product-specific ratings for each job and ask for a rating after every online chat or email with our customer service team. By closely monitoring the feedback, we can quickly address issues or trends that could lead to lower review scores.”

What are some common themes you see in our customer reviews?
“The themes we see regularly are the same three themes by which we operate at Smartpress: premium quality printing, world-class service and social responsibility. These are not aspirational qualities that we determined in a conference room one day. It’s our way of sharing what our customers are telling us about why they choose Smartpress.”

How does our approach to business lend itself to a positive customer experience?
“I’ve worked at a number of different companies, ranging from venture capital-backed, private equity-owned and large scale public companies. Smartpress is the first one I’ve been part of that is 100% employee-owned. I believe our employee ownership is a big reason for our success in focusing on wowing our customers.”

How important are customer reviews and product reviews to you?
“Reviews and customer feedback are important enough to me that I read them every day. I even respond directly to customers and public reviews at times. My direct interactions with customers are very helpful in shaping our strategy and confirm some of our future priorities for improving the customer experience.”

So someone’s always monitoring reviews? And we make business changes or glean opportunities based on what we see?
“Yes and YES!”

What’s the Smartpress customer service philosophy? How was it formed?
“Our approach to customer service began with our founder and lives on through our company values: to wow the customer, take ownership of our work, have a passion for excellence and work as a team.”

What kind of training do our Customer Experience Specialists go through?
“Based on our high ratings, some might think we provide intensive customer service training, along with detailed standard operating procedures on how to handle different customer requests, when in fact the opposite is true.

“We give our teams good tools for communicating with customers and general guidelines on how to treat different customer situations, and then empower individuals and teams to make good decisions on behalf of the company. When the employees are all co-owners of the business, we find that they treat customers well!”

What does Smartpress offer customers that other companies don’t?
“I’ve worked at companies where they attempt to automate the customer service process with chat bots or automated responses. Another company outsourced or consolidated customer service teams into a centralized function that was distanced from the business. An initiative at one former employer was even for leadership to hide the customer service phone number from the website in an effort to cut down on customer calls.

“Smartpress’ approach provides an opportunity for our customers to reach out to us via phone, email or online chat. And during normal business hours, there will be a real person on the other end. Customers can feel good knowing that the person helping them is a co-owner of the business and intrinsically motivated to provide a superior customer experience.”