Customers: They’re the real stars of customer satisfaction

Every year, J.D. Power and Associates completes its annual Paint Satisfaction Study to help us understand how happy customers are with the products they’ve chosen, and how well they’ve performed in what is now a $26.2 billion interior paint, exterior paint and stain industry. Here at Matthews Painting, we were pleased to see how well Sherwin-Williams products ranked again – they’re No. 1 in exterior paint satisfaction – but that’s not really what this month’s blog is about.  Good news for our Goshen, Indiana and Columbia City Indiana customers.

Instead, we wondered about satisfaction with our own performance! While it’s easy to find the answers to how durable people think the paint is, or how satisfied people are with the warranty, we pride ourselves on exceptional service and thought we’d look at what our customers say about us.

This matters more than ever, because online reviews are such a key part of how people choose a business or service. The numbers vary, but more than two-thirds of Americans  – and even up to 90 percent, according to Consumer Reports – read user reviews before they make the decision to buy a product or hire a provider. Whether they’re on Amazon or Yelp or Crowd Reviews, or increasingly shared on Facebook and other social media products, a company’s reputation is shaped by reviews.

But how do you know that the reviews people write are accurate? “You can’t assume that people follow such a scientific approach before they rate products online,” said marketing researcher Bart de Langhe, who just published a University of Colorado study on user reviews. In some cases, the reviews people trust to make important decisions are paid for, and not even from real users.

It’s not news to us at Matthews. That’s why we’ve always based our business on our relationship with customers, and on delivering experience that we stand by. We are neighbors to our customers and connected to our community, so we focus on quality painting standards that are second-to-none in customer satisfaction. That satisfaction is reflected in the real testimonials of our customers.

We know that hiring a paint contractor is an important decision about a significant investment, so we make sure that from the minute we first meet to discuss the work and prepare an estimate, a potential client has access to those reviews. We’ve now completed more than 1,000 jobs at homes and businesses in our Northeast Indiana area, including the pet store shown here, and 75 percent of our business comes from repeat customers and the referrals they provide to others. While you can check us out on Facebook and see reviews there, or see an Angie’s List profile, we think it’s helpful to connect directly with customers.

User reviews and star ranking systems can be helpful tools for making decisions, so long as people know that they can be trusted. They are in many ways just a high-tech version of what businesses have always been built on: reputation. The word-of-mouth experience may seem old school, but that’s what user reviews really are –and that’s what continues to build the excellent business name of Matthews Painting. We want you to check out what our customers say, but more important, we want to hear from you, too, so that others benefit from the opinions you share with the community!

Matthews Painting is  now expanding our interior and exterior wall, ceiling, trim, door, window and kitchen cabinet painting and staining, wallpaper removal, drywall repair, deck staining and sealing and log Home staining and sealing into the Goshen, Indiana, Columbia City Indiana, Warsaw, Winona Lake, Leesburg, Syracuse, Indiana, North Webster, North Manchester, Lake Wawasee and Lake Tippecanoe areas.