It’s important for every business to closely monitor what customers are saying about them. A single negative review might see you shifting your business model in order to accommodate a specific type of customer.
On the other hand, a stellar five star review means that customer will be recommending your services left and right. It goes without saying how crucial it is to stay on top of things by relying on a well-integrated review and reputation management tool.
These ‘fun facts’ are worth noting:
- Around 92% consumers read online reviews before making purchase decisions while 68% say reading positive reviews makes them trust local business more
- Around 87% prospects don’t consider buying from businesses with low rated reviews
- Around 88% online visitors trust online business reviews as much as personal recommendations
What Business Reviews Are All About
Online business reviews refer to comments or impressions left on your product/service by anyone who’s not directly associated with the business, such as a customer or user. Your product reviews which appear either on your website or affiliate websites are typically known as UGC or user generated content.
Why Business Reviews Are So Important
Whether you like it or not, people will post both good and bad impressions on your business. What really matters is how proactive you are when it comes to addressing customer grievances.
In order to understand why online business reviews are so critical to the success of every business, we need to see how customers fit into the purchasing funnel for their desired products/services. Usually, by the time they start checking out reviews, they have already made up their minds about what they want to buy and how your business can help them achieve that.
What makes business reviews such a vital part of the equation is that the gap between someone going through a review and deciding to purchase from you is literally so small that it typically leads to a yes or no decision right there and then. It’s during these moments that your online reputation comes into play.
How Are Online Reviews Different from Purchase Intent?
Some businesses like to measure their reputation through a method called Purchase Intent. There are generally two ways to accomplish this: you ask through a survey or find a way to spy on conversations between people who intend to buy from you somewhere down the line.
Online surveys suffer from certain drawbacks in terms of distribution, sample size and participant selection. However, it helps companies to see if “purchase intent” rises or drops over time, which can be used to gauge reputation and popularity.
Online business reviews on the other hand, are permanently etched on the Internet for everybody to see. Those are words people use to directly relay what they think of the business, the various pros and cons to consider before making the decision to purchase. In fact, many prospects prefer reading several customer reviews rather than a lengthy product review on an authoritative site.
Reviews are a great opportunity to identify what people love about your product/service and where to improve things if the need arises.
Online Review Management Components: What We do
Seeing all your reviews in one place and then planning on how to best respond to them is something that can be made very convenient with the right online review management tool. Here are some common aspects that form the basis of our online review management methods:
Multi-site Monitoring
We monitor only the most sought-after review sites daily for the latest reviews: Google, Foursquare, YellowPages, Facebook, Yahoo, Yelp and more.
Email Alerts and Response Notifications
Every time you get a review, we let you know via email. Also, embedded within your email alerts is the option to respond directly to those online customer reviews.
Multi-location Monitoring
It doesn’t matter if you’re business is thriving off just 10 locations or over 500 locations – a custom dashboard makes it very easy to manage all your online reviews.
Store-by-store Rankings
It’s always good to know how your stores rank against each other through our customer ranking system.
Multi-level Reporting
Get automatically generated reports at all levels – corporate, regional, district or at the local store level.
Multi-level Dashboards
Provide dashboard access to your sales and business teams at the corporate, regional, district and store level.
Missing Profile Alerts
You may be missing certain local review profiles across the web – we help you track down which ones.
How Businesses Are Getting Ahead Using Review Management Tools
Here’s how the most successful businesses, both big and small, are managing their online customer reviews:
Track Em’
To effectively manage online customer reviews, you must know when and where they’re popping up. To accomplish this effectively, use a top online review management tool to help you do all the tracking and reporting.
Top review sites like Yelp, FourSquare and Google send notifications each time one of your products or services is reviewed, as long as you’re a site member on any one of these. For a broader search, take advantage of Google Alerts which reports mentions of your company, or other terms you have requested, in blogs, web pages, videos and discussions. Twitter Search also helps you snoop around Twitter for desired terms.
However, to get the full all-rounder package, it is highly recommended you invest in a complex review and reputation monitoring tool – make it easy on yourself and call us for a FREE consultation at 1.888.566.2577.
Take Ownership of Your Business Page
Yelp, Google Places and Urbanspoon are three examples of sites which all use publicly viewable data to generate a page for your company. Some sites will do this when you get a review, however, others do it by default in order to provide detailed search listings to users.
So what you need to do is claim your page, which is free, and then exercise control over what it has. If a page hasn’t been made for this purpose, you can make one yourself. In order to claim/create a page, visit your chosen site and look for a button that says ‘Claim Your Page’ or ‘For Business’, based on which site you are on.
Claiming your page like this improves your search ranking listing and unlocks access to special services provided by review sites – tools to trace and analyze reviews, even the option to communicate directly with reviewers.
Respond to Those Great Reviews
When you respond to positive customer reviews, it demonstrates how you appreciate them giving you kudos. Let them know by sending a professionally written private message for their eyes only. You could also answer publicly through forums like Twitter and Facebook. However, you’ll need to decide if you want to respond to every single positive review or only the super-positive ones. You can even Like or Retweet positive reviews.
It is not recommended that you offer rewards to reviewers like gift vouchers, because this can constitute a bribe, which paints your business in a rather poor light. Also, don’t get on their nerves by asking them to be a part of the weekly mailing list. Simply make a quick introduction and thank them graciously for doing business with you.
If you feel a particular aspect of your business might interest them, you can mention that for sure – a customer writes a great review on one of your game console peripherals, and you can inform them of a virtual reality headset that’s in the works.
Managing Negative Reviews is Equally Important
It is okay to fear negative customer reviews as they can drive away some of your best customers. Luckily, it is easy to manage the bad ones and even capitalize on them in some cases. You have absolutely nothing to lose, so contact us to see how it’s all done to your benefit.
Sometimes, coming across negative sentiments on your business might make you want to respond impulsively, trying to justify that the customer is either misinformed or missing something. That can spell disaster for your online business presence.
Respond appropriately – don’t lay the blame or tell them they did something wrong which lead to the negative experience. Do not make your response accusatory or emotional in the least bit. Pay close attention to what they are saying and reply in a highly professional and balanced manner, addressing their pain points.
In addition, keep your response brief and to the point. Wordy responses can give customers reason to pinpoint more negative issues, which could have been put aside to begin with. Remember, everyone’s reading your responses, unless you choose to respond to customers directly. Even then, there’s no telling who they’re going to share those responses with. Hire someone to do this professionally for you so that nothing is left to chance.
Don’t Ever Have Fake Reviews Posted
It is a completely unethical business practice and a violation of review site rules to have positive reviews posted about your business, while posting negative ones on your competitor’s offerings. Posting fake reviews can have serious legal ramifications such as losing thousands of dollars on account of lawsuits. Top reviews sites have already gone a step further to filter as many fake reviews as possible.
Making it All a Complete Success
Want to better manage online reviews in order to maximize your business’s success?
The central point for measuring business success is the Internet-driven market space, where your presence can either make it or break it. If you’re not already doing this, you need to start monitoring well-known reviews sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp and Google. Have a review form on your website and monitor that closely too.
Keeping an eye on these sites gives you great insights into what your customers like, and, you’re in a good position to quickly respond to negative reviews. Before irate customers really lose patience, you can douse the flames and address their troubles.
You will inevitably come across reviews left by upset customers – the key thing to remember is that you should not only be quick to respond but also acknowledge that you understand why a particular customer is displeased. Offer to have them contact you privately either through phone or email so that you can individually address their concerns.
Businesses that are quick to respond to positive AND negative reviews foster long-term relationships with their customers. Also, they are more than happy to point more people in your direction without any hesitancy whatsoever.
Achieving Success by Banking on a Review Management Team
A review management team is tasked with monitoring online customer reviews at all possible online business locations and analyzes them at length, in order to provide keen insights into customer impressions.
This helps businesses understand what locations are the most popular or why a specific type of product or service is generating bad reviews. This lets you get on top of potential problems fast and have several channels at your disposal in order to respond to both negative and positive reviews.
Review monitoring keeps you in the loop at all times by keeping you well informed on where the best reviews are sprouting up and what people are saying about you. Our team reaches out to them on a regular basis to let them know that their voices are being heard and things are being done to constantly improve their experience.
When you invest in a qualified review monitoring and management team, you are creating a highly effective and long-term dialogue with your customers. You need to show them that you are in this together, which makes it all the more vital to keep a check on all reviews and respond to them where appropriate. Your business should be portrayed as a living, breathing organism that is always ready to listen to customers and make no compromises at all in terms of quality, while living up to their promise.
Harness the Power of Online Reviews – The Future
In an online business landscape that’s fiercely competitive and evolving, every business must manage its online reputation in order to enjoy fruitful relationships with customers.
Unless you create a dynamic dialogue with your customers, you cannot remain competitive for long. The best businesses will continue to drive you into the ground just because they have a better customer review management team. Respond to those positive customer sentiments and embrace the negative ones; it’s a chance to redeem yourself so that you’re number one in your customer’s’ books again.
AOK Wants to See You as a Niche Leader
Don’t ever miss another review or a chance to make things better. Monitor all your online reviews and decide on the best response mechanisms.
It’s not just your product or service, but how far you’re willing to go in order to live up to your standards. Businesses who have the readiest of ears establish high credibility and long-term customer satisfaction.
Contact us today to see how an active review management team can open new doors for your business.
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