evo + Pearl-Plaza: Leveraging Reputation Management To Deliver Unique Experiences + Open New Locations
evo — a leading online outdoor retail and experiences company focused on providing unique experiences across the globe — fully recognizes the importance of online reviews in retail and hospitality. evo’s family of brands spans retail, gear, travel, and hospitality.
The company sees tremendous value in managing location reviews in its pursuit of delivering exceptional experiences that retain customers and bring new ones to the door. By leveraging review data, the brand can pinpoint issues before they grow into crisis and implement improvements – and has even opened new retail locations thanks to the data and insights!
Through partnership with Pearl-Plaza, evo was able to:
- Increase customer engagement with a proactive review response strategy
- Improve customer experiences by leveraging reviews
- Reduce friction in the buyer’s journey by amplifying happy voices
- Expand their footprint and grow their business through insights and data
Customer Engagement: The Key to Delivering Exceptional Experiences
As a customer-first brand, focused on delivering unique and satisfying experiences, evo’s number one priority is to engage and understand its customers. Lack of visibility into negative reviews resulted in repetitive negative customer experiences, that otherwise could have been avoided. Manually logging into review sites to respond to reviews made engaging with customers slow and difficult. The brand sought efficient ways to capture customer feedback internally and increase satisfaction. To accelerate customer acquisition, and remove friction in the buyer’s journey, evo looked into amplifying happy voices on the channels where customers convert, fostering trust and consumer confidence.
Addressing Issues to Mitigate Patterns
To address the challenges and engage with its customers, evo adopted Pearl-Plaza’s Reputation Management solution. The organization set up a unique set of customized review alerts, which deliver timely email and SMS notifications on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, allowing the team to rapidly engage with customers and resolve issues so they don’t become a pattern.
evo implemented a strategic response strategy using Smart Response technology to engage with more reviews in less time and address customer concerns while ensuring brand-compliant messaging. With 80% of evo’s reviews being posted on Google, it makes sense to connect their Google My Business (GMB) account to Pearl-Plaza and respond quickly to reviews — without having to manually log into GMB or risk losing unanswered reviews in the shuffle.
Proactively soliciting feedback is the key to ensuring customer satisfaction. The company uses Pearl-Plaza Reputation Management to ask for reviews and feedback while accelerating review coverage, and enhancing social proof for evo’s brand and retail locations.
Text Analytics technology analyzes the captured feedback data across multiple categories such as product, service, location, and value. The customer sentiment for evo is consistently positive, surpassing industry benchmarks by 12%.
To reduce friction in the buyer’s journey and showcase the best of what customers have to say about each business location, the brand’s online reviews and ratings are strategically displayed on evo’s individual location pages, fostering trust and encouraging action.
In early 2021, evo expanded its efforts to deliver excellent customer experience by leveraging Pearl-Plaza’s Employee Experience solution. The company has access to employee reviews and feedback sourced directly from evo’s Glassdoor and Indeed profiles. This allows the brand to listen to employees and take transformational actions to improve performance, tenure, and overall employee fulfillment, also positively impacting the way they serve customers.
Investing In Proactive Reputation Management Pays Off
The entire evo organization understands and acts on this. Following its success with Pearl-Plaza, evo has opened new satellite store locations in Snoqualmie Pass, WA and Hood River, OR, plus a new concept called Campus Salt Lake, which includes another flagship retail location in Salt Lake City.
Reviews and ratings are critically important to support evo’s fastest-growing product categories such as mountain bike and surf. Highlighting customers’ experiences purchasing these products helps others discover the brand as a destination for these newer categories. 87% of evo’s online reviews are 5-star ratings and the brand surpasses industry benchmarks with its 4.6 average star rating. Through its partnership with Pearl-Plaza, the company is putting customer experience at the forefront and earning 5-star reviews along the way.
