Customer Thermometer has been and always will be an online business – which means much of our communication with customers and prospects is also online, via chat and email.

Both the founders of the service and our Ministry of Magic go out of their way to have real conversations, either face to face or via phone/Skype with potential and existing users of the service. There is nothing more refreshing that hearing how customers have been using the service, how their response rates have been and how the application has transformed someone’s business for the better.

RE/MAX READY’s story

A great example of us reaching out proactively to a customer was with one of the thousands of RE/MAX branches who’d chosen to use Customer Thermometer about a year ago. We got in touch to find out how they’d been finding the service and they couldn’t have been more helpful in their feedback. Eric Rehling, owner of RE/MAX READY, PA was only too happy to tell his story and explain how his team had been using the service.

Like all online businesses, you are what you are online. In the Real Estate world, testimonials are everything. Customers choose their Realtor® based on credibility. Testimonials and social proof are a surefire way of doing that. Eric needed a better way to get more testimonials and to find out what his customers were really thinking to his team’s services.

We spoke in some detail about how to get real estate testimonials. It’s clearly not easy. Customers are busy and even with offering $50 Amazon vouchers as an incentive, he still couldn’t get the results he needed. That’s when he found Customer Thermometer. And everything has now changed.

With our 1-click response to an email it couldn’t be simpler for a customer to leave a rating initially. Leaving a comment is then a natural thing to do. Why? Because you’ve not already taken up valuable time of the recipient.

Asking a customer to “fill in a survey, it’ll only take 5 minutes” pretty much guarantees a negligible response rate and therefore testimonials are hard to come by.

Eric Rehling’s testimonial

Eric was kind enough to shoot a short 2 minute video for us, describing his experiences:

What next? Getting more public reviews…

With the release of Customer Thermometer 2.08 a few weeks ago, Eric can now get twice as much value for money by encouraging customers who hit (for example) a Gold star rating to leave testimonials on Zillow or Trulia, the principle public feedback networks for the Real Estate industry in the US.

He can do this via custom social media icons and/or a simple advert. Take a look at an example below:

We’re delighted to have a RE/MAX business recommending Customer Thermometer and we’d like to thank Eric of RE/MAX Ready for being so generous with his time.