At a time when a business’s relationship and understanding of their customers has never been more important, ReviewTrackers provides the means to bridge that connection through powerful reporting and analytical tools. Using data, insights, and technology, ReviewTrackers provides brands with the ability to optimise customer experience and increase profitability.

Founder and CEO Chris Campbell launched the company in 2012 with a focus on developing scalable technology that respond to the evolving needs of enterprise clients across key markets.

We talked with Chris about how he identified the need for a service like ReviewTrackers, the importance of culture fit, and his vision of ‘ultimate success’.

STARTING
THE BUSINESS

What led to you starting your first business?

I founded ReviewTrackers in 2012 while I was still working as a digital marketing strategist. A number of business clients came to with a problem they needed to solve: to track online reviews as efficiently as possible.

Like many customer-focused organizations, my clients realized that reviews and customer feedback posted on sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, and Facebook were extremely critical to the success of their business, particularly in terms of their online brand reputation, improving their search performance and identifying customer experience issues and opportunities.

My clients asked me if there were already existing solutions in the market. But there weren’t, or at least there were none that we were happy with. So I decided to build a solution with the core features that my clients needed, and this became the foundation of the ReviewTrackers platform. My clients were among our first-ever customers.

Since launch, ReviewTrackers has grown 100x, and our team has no plans to slow down the pace. Recently, we raised a strong round of growth capital, which allows us to accelerate the process of making our product faster and stronger than ever for our customers.

What makes ReviewTrackers so unique?

When our customers talk, we listen. This is how we are able to understand what they truly think or feel about our product. Obviously, a lot of service providers, entrepreneurs, tech startups, and B2B software companies also try to harness feedback for continuous improvement; at ReviewTrackers, we live it every single day, and understanding the customer experience is at the heart of what we do.

Not coincidentally, this is the very same concept or idea that makes the ReviewTrackers platform special. It allows our customers — from small business to enterprise-level organizations — to listen efficiently to their customers. Our software’s intuitive, easy-to-use interface empowers all kinds of users — from frontline to the C-suite — to easily manage online reviews and customer feedback without wasting time.

ReviewTrackers’ ability to listen to customers also extends to include our award-winning Customer Happiness team. Not only does our team proactively and reactively listen and act to assist customers; they also work every day to curate, so to speak, the best possible ReviewTrackers experience, which can involve anything from running custom reports to providing customers with trending best practices and other types of personalised content.

What was the toughest issue you faced when starting out?

Our roots started in marketing to and engaging with small businesses, but over the years we have been evolving in order to solve the problems of the enterprise market. The company’s growth influenced our decision to shift our focus.

What do you wish you’d known starting out that you had to learn the hard way?

When I first started out, I had little idea of how important culture fit was when recruiting the team members who would be part of the company’s growth.

Without culture fit, it’s difficult for the leadership team to rally individuals into sharing the core values and objectives of the company.

Of course, culture fit is a concept that’s hard to define, but in the last few years I have learned to sharpen my focus on finding people who fit the ReviewTrackers culture. And I have learned – sometimes the hard way – that workplace outcomes can be affected by whether or not the personality and values of an individual are in line with that of the organisation.

LOOKING TO
THE FUTURE

What do you believe it takes to stay at the top of your industry?

The ability to bring ideas to life is what I believe will help us stay at the top of our industry. But this requires a few key components. One is having a clear vision. Do you just want to build something for the sake of it? Or do you see something in your idea that will help solve real-world problems? A second component is focus, the kind of razor-sharp focus needed to realise that vision. And three: you have to have the ability to execute.

Do you believe in ‘ultimate success’? If so, what does that look like to you?

As an entrepreneur, I do believe in ultimate success, which to me can be achieved by creating extraordinary value for our customers. I also believe that the thrill is in the chase, and that there are other incidental successes: for example, establishing a recognised brand, being able to sell the idea of ReviewTrackers to investors.

In defining success for any business, what I think has remained constant is the fact that people invest in a business idea because it meets needs, and not because it has needs. So, for ReviewTrackers to stay on the course to ultimate success, we have to be able to continuously identify and understand our customer’s’ problems, and to come up with innovative ways to solve these problems. Always getting to the heart of what our customers need is, to me, what ultimate success looks like.

Finally, what advice would you share with emerging entrepreneurs hoping to follow in your footsteps?

Listen to your customers, hire amazing people, and take purposeful steps to becoming a great leader.