Reputation management is the practice of actively managing your business’s online reputation, including reviews, social media or forum mentions, and questions on various web platforms such as Google My Business or Amazon. Reputation management could also be called perception management, as it not only serves the purpose of keeping existing customers happy, but also collectively crafts the perception that future prospective customers will have of your business.
Over 90% of consumers read online reviews before making large purchase decisions. This means that not only is it important to cultivate a strong online reputation, but you must manage it actively, replying to questions, comments, and concerns that you receive. It’s impossible to avoid ever receiving a negative review. Some customers just can’t be pleased, despite your best efforts, and when they go to Google, Facebook, Yelp, or another review platform to complain, the way you handle their complaint will be visible to future prospective customers who are thinking about doing business with you. Not replying will make it appear as if you don’t care when someone has a negative experience, while combating the unhappy person’s comments can turn a situation from bad to worse.
In review management it is important to promptly reply to reviews and questions in a positive and constructive way. Even in the face of negative reviews, replying apologetically and offering to try to resolve the problem offline can hopefully help turn around an unhappy customer’s experience, but will definitely improve the perception of potential future customers.
The more reviews you have online, and of course the higher their average score, the more people are going to trust that they will have a good experience doing business with you. To this end, the other side of reputation management is to try to get more reviews. This is done through a set of efforts, including interactions at the time of sale, prompting a review, as well as email and text follow up after the sale.
Our experienced reputation management team will take the burden off your shoulders by managing every mention and review while guiding your time of sale activities and digitally soliciting your existing customers for new reviews.
Accurate and complete monitoring for new reviews is crucial to success in reputation management. You need to know that a review has been left in a timely manner and issue a response whether the review was positive or negative. We use platform APIs and proprietary monitoring methods to make sure no review is missed, even outside of normally recognized review platforms.
When we encounter a negative review on one of your reputation platforms, we de-escalate and seek to move the conversation offline. Engaging a customer about their specific complaint online can lead to a negative back and forth which can make the situation worse. In particularly negative situations, the wrong response can even lead to a more public, multi-platform reputation crisis.
Even if the customer is in the wrong, we reply apologetically and provide them with contact information for someone at your business. Ideally their experience can be turned around so they improve their review, but even if they don’t, people reading your reviews can see that you tried.
Some review platforms are magnets for negative reviews. This can be true universally but might also be a circumstantial occurrence for your business. We identify the platforms where you’re suffering the most and work to specifically improve those ratings through solicitation efforts.
When soliciting reviews, we choose which of your review platforms we want to present as options for leaving reviews. This way if one or two platforms are suffering, we can reinforce them with new positive reviews. Alternatively, you may have specific reviews that you know get the most attention. We consider all the factors, and help to channel more positive reviews where you need them.