How Rural King Uses Review Data to Create Memorable In-Store Experiences
Rural King, a family-owned farm supply store with 128 stores across 13 states, is no stranger to creating memorable customer experiences. No matter which location you enter, you’ll be greeted with their standard welcome: “Enjoy a free bag of popcorn and a cup of coffee on us.”
Rural King understands their customers because they do their best to listen to them. In an effort to continue to excel at that, the company partnered with Pearl-Plaza to utilize the reputation management platform to manage all of its stores’ online reviews and customer feedback, as well as uncover insights that can help the company stay ahead of customers’ expectations.
Defining the Customer Experience with Review Data
For companies with multiple locations, it is hard to manually sift through all the reviews, especially when they number in the hundreds of thousands. Rural King is using Pearl-Plaza to analyze large quantities of review data. So far, the company has analyzed over 250,000 reviews utilizing customer experience analytics technology.
“We use customer comments from reviews to pivot our store experience. With [Pearl-Plaza], we have learned more about why customers love Rural King.”
-Kirk Waidelich, VP of Marketing for Rural King
Rural King is using multiple dashboards to achieve a more accurate, holistic view of the customer experience. Here are two of the dashboards they are using that have helped them achieve such great results:
- The Keywords Dashboard: This dashboard highlights the most relevant keywords, and sentiment associated with the keywords, used by customers in their reviews.
- The Experience Analysis Dashboard: An AI-driven keyword tool that analyzes customer sentiment across major customer experience categories, such as product, service, location, value, and customer.
These tools enable Rural King’s entire team—from customer support to C-suite—to have access to Voice of the Customer data and discover what is shaping the customer experience
How Rural King Stays Proactive with Review and Keyword Alerts
A cornerstone of Pearl-Plaza’s reputation management software is the ability to set up review and keyword alerts. When customers create a review, or when a review mentions a tagged keyword, an alert is sent out.
Rural King has multiple stakeholders with access to the Pearl-Plaza platform, each with their own customized set of alerts. These alerts are delivered on a scheduled basis such as daily, weekly, or monthly.
This team also has their Google My Business account linked to the platform, which allows them to respond to Google reviews directly in the platform as opposed to having to manually log in to GMB to respond to reviews.
These initiatives have helped Rural King realize success in their brand reputation management in metrics such as:
- 59% faster review response time
- 67% review response rate—a 36% increase
- An overall review rating of 4.32
Improve Your Reputation Management Strategy with Pearl-Plaza
To create an actionable strategy that takes the guesswork out of improving your customer experience, schedule a reputation demo today to see how Pearl-Plaza can help you achieve business success.
