Harvard Business Services, established in 1981, is a Delaware Registered Agent that helps clients form and maintain their Delaware companies. The company also helps them obtain public record documents on their behalf and provide various other services.
Since Rick Bell first founded the business in his basement in Wilmington Delaware, the company has formed more than 125,000 Delaware companies and now employs over 30 people. To celebrate their amazing 2,000 reviews and 9.8/10 TrustScore, we spoke with Michael Bell, Vice President and Director of Marketing, to better understand how they leverage Trustpilot reviews throughout the business.
Rick and Michael Bell
TP: How long have you been using Trustpilot?
Michael Bell: I first learned about Trustpilot at a marketing conference in 2014. We’ve always maintained an extremely high level of customer service and, at the time, needed a better way to direct prospects to trustworthy reviews and testimonials from existing clients.
TP: Harvard Business Services offers many services… How do you use your reviews on your websites and in your marketing?
MB: We’ve used Trustpilot reviews on our website in several ways. We have a Testimonials page that includes a large Trustpilot widget. We’ve also added smaller widgets to key landing pages and product pages to help instill trust with our site visitors. Some especially good reviews we transform into an image we can post to social media.
TP: What are the biggest advantages the business has seen from using Trustpilot?
MB: In our line of business, our customer service is second to none, and Trustpilot really helps us – and our clients – put it in prospective. We have a 9.8/10 trust rating and, at the moment, we’re #11 in the entire “For Businesses” category, which includes over 900 companies.
It’s important that our clients know they can trust us with efficiently filing their paperwork, being their Registered Agent, and keeping their information secure. Trustpilot makes it extremely easy for us to point clients and prospects to a single place where they can’t help but be impressed with the feedback we’re receiving.
TP: How do you use the Trustpilot platform?
MB: When we receive outstanding reviews that we want to showcase, we take the text of the review, place it into an image, and share that with our social networks.
Our industry doesn’t lend itself to social media and community building the way others do, but we do see that our Trustpilot review posts tend to get more engagement than others. More than once, they’ve been our top performing posts in a given month.
Reviews play a huge validation role for us. That’s why either I or Rick, my father, takes a moment to reply to each and every review we receive to thank the client for their feedback and wish them luck with their business. In the very unlikely event that they’re not entirely satisfied, we use the reply as an opportunity to continue the conversation and make things right.
The Trustpilot platform has been extremely easy to use. I get all the functionality and information I need without getting bogged down and distracted by unnecessary details. I also really like the pre-made widgets and the many options available. We’re starting to experiment more with which widgets work best on which pages.
TP: Are there multiple departments or teams using Trustpilot?
MB: Every Trustpilot review we get is immediately sent out to all employees. The continual stream of 5-star reviews is inspiring and the occasional negative review is a serious wake-up call. The five-star reviews are definitely a morale booster. Our whole team is proud of the praise we get from our clients and it’s rewarding to know we’ve helped them take an important step in the entrepreneurial process.
At the moment, marketing is the department most involved with using our Trustpilot reviews, but our sales team also uses them as needed. Most of our business is inbound, whether it’s a phone call, email, or via our “live chat” feature.
Each of those connects directly to our sales team and often there are questions to be answered before someone is comfortable moving forward with their business formation. We love when those questions are something like, “Why should I use Harvard instead of ?” Part of that answer is our outstanding lifetime customer service promise, easily backed up by our Trustpilot reviews.
TP: What are your challenges going forward as a business?
MB: We’ve been growing and hitting new internal records every year for the past several years, but we also need to make sure we do that without sacrificing the customer service (and resulting reviews) that enables us to keep clients – new and returning – coming to us more and more every year. Our reviews are one way that we know we’re keeping that focus front and center.
The business landscape is always changing and so our industry can be somewhat cyclical and volatile. On top of that, we often have new competitors emerging that we need to be aware of, in addition to keeping up with the more established ones.
While we can’t control the economy, changes to corporate law, or what our competitors are doing, we can always control what we ourselves are doing. To that end, Trustpilot provides a level of objective stability. In a strong or weak market, and as competitors come and go, we have strong reviews that no one else can beat.
Trustpilot makes it easy for us to make them visible and easy for our clients and prospects to trust us.
TP: Thank you for your time! It was great to learn more about your business.
To learn more about Harvard Business Services, head to their website. If you’d like to find out more about Trustpilot reviews, request a demo below.
