Pawn America – Elevating the Retail Experience

Pawn America opened its first 900-square-foot store in Robbinsdale, Minnesota in 1991. Today, the chain has 17 locations and is proud to offer unique items for every shopper. Their stores steer clear of traditional ‘pawn shop’ vibes and instead provide shoppers with an elevated retail experience.

Challenge

As the chain continued to open new stores, leaders faced fresh challenges around incorporating scalable ways to manage and respond to customer reviews. Pawn America realized they needed a partner to help them manage their brand reputation.

The team set out to achieve three goals:

• Effectively communicate to customers how their brand is different than traditional pawn shops.
• Better understand the guest experience and use customer feedback to continually improve service at every store.
• Increase review ratings to improve search rankings.

Director of Marketing and New Business Development, Dan Kealey, said, “We want to be able to not only provide 5-star service but also have our guests tell us how we were doing.”

Solution

Pawn America chose Chatmeter to help them achieve their goals. The company implemented a Strive for 5 customer service strategy focused on improving guest services while using Chatmeter’s review management solution to prompt more reviews and generate more customer engagement. Pawn America quickly achieved positive results toward reaching its goal of increasing star ratings, enhancing consumer perceptions, and boosting search ratings.

Dan Kealey says, “Chatmeter’s platform was the perfect solution for giving us that control and management over our reviews. The feature we use and value the most is review management. Being able to collect reviews from multiple platforms and bring them all into Chatmeter – the efficiency is fantastic.” While the efficiency benefits are fantastic, a more nuanced benefit also stands out to Kealey. He explains, “Chatmeter motivates people. It creates inherent competition between stores and staff, and all of that is good because the end result is fantastic customer service for our guests.”Chatmeter’s dedication to constant product evolution and improvement is also a major standout to Pawn America. Kealey says, “Chatmeter adds features to their platform faster than any other company I’ve ever dealt with. They do an incredible job of re-investing and making their platform second to none.”

Results

In just one year with Chatmeter, Pawn America made serious headway in boosting its search visibility, review count, and customer engagement:

• 8,458% increase in 5-star reviews
• 1,906% increase in the total number of reviews
• 104% increase in review response rate
• 58.8% Google search ranking visibility boost

The team is absolutely thrilled with the outcomes they’ve seen so far and are looking forward to tracking their continued improvement.

Chatmeter’s a great quality control check. We needed something that not only we could project out to the rest of the world to see our positive reviews, but we needed an internal mechanism and measurement to motivate our staff to be the very, very best they can be. Chatmeter gives us the unique ability to isolate which metrics should be used to score a restaurant location and compare locations to each other – apples to apples

Dan Kealey, Director of Marketing and New Business Development