The 6 Pillars of Modern Online Reputation Management
In today’s interconnected world, customer experiences are counting for more and more. This means that online reviews mean total market transparency for perspective buyers to look at before they make a purchasing decision.
In fact, Deloitte research found a massive 81% of UK consumers read online reviews and star ratings, whilst in 2016, they found that online reviews are amongst the most trusted sources of information on a company’s products or services. Do a search for your own company online, if you’re not happy with what you see, then you’re almost certainly missing out on potential revenue.
With this in mind, what can you do to improve your online reputation?
There are six pillars of effective Online Reputation Management which can get you on the right path to taking control of your online presence.
1. Request and Respond to Reviews
Asking for reviews yourself is a key component of effectively managing your online estate, don’t simply wait for them to come in themselves! Nearly 80% of people don’t pay attention to reviews older than three months, as they don’t believe they accurately describe the current quality of a business’s product or service. You can’t afford to wait for reviews to roll in — you have to ask for them.
Using email, SMS and kiosk-based methods to round out your strategy and engage your customers in the ways they prefer, you can greatly improve the amount of reviews you’re bringing in.
Once you’ve gotten the review, be sure to respond promptly — preferably within 48 hours of receiving a review. If it’s positive, thank them. If it’s negative, do something to alleviate the issue. This demonstrates your commitment to customer service and may prevent dissatisfied customers from complaining on other sites.
2. Use Surveys to Identify and Address Issues
Surveys help you collect information about how customers experience your products or services, identify what you’re doing right and uncover problem areas so you can fix them.
But wait, there’s more! Surveys can now help generate revenue for your organisation.
Reputation.com’s survey solution, for example, helps you gain insight into the customer experience with deep analytics and benchmarking tools. It also helps you build review volume and amplify your success with website streaming.
Such innovation lets you fine-tune customer experience by tapping into the data, while strengthening your brand perception online.
Be sure to respect your customers’ time, surveys should be brief, readily accessible and easy to complete mobile apps, online forms or via tablets, purely for convenience.
3. Help People Find You with Accurate Business Listings
Let’s be honest, search engines are the new Yellow Pages. Anybody who is looking for your business’s address, telephone number or opening hours goes straight online, performs a quick search for your company name, and hey presto – everything they need is displayed for them to use… or is it?
Accurate business listings are essential, a listing that sends potential customers to an old location creates a negative experience that could result in negative reviews, or a derogatory social comment that goes viral and causes serious damage to a location’s ability to generate business. Imagine you’re looking to buy a new car, you search online and find a dealer which has a great offer on a car you want. They’re 10 miles away but it’s a Sunday and you don’t have much planned, so decide to pop along and see the car for yourself. Of course, you get to the dealership and despite what the business listing days, they’re actually closed on Sundays – you wouldn’t be very happy, would you?
To avoid this potential pitfall, audit, claim and correct all your online locations listings. Google is a good place to start, as its Google My Business service is free, and Google handles over 1.2 billion unique users per month, but your business may be listed on many other sites, as well. Implementing a process for auditing and correcting your listings helps ensure consistency and accuracy.
4. Engage Customers and Prospects with Social Media
It’s impossible to evade the pull of social media. Since 2015, Google search results have pulled relevant tweets into the results pages, meaning customers tweeting your company account, or even tweeting with relevant keywords, can show-up whenever someone does a search through Google.
Managing this content has, because of these changes, become an essential part of any business’s ORM plan.
Whilst most businesses these days have a Facebook or Twitter account, it’s important to remember that the content you put on these channels isn’t just seen by the people following your business, but also potentially by people simply searching on Google. Additionally, if the content other people are posting – for example a review or tweet directed at you – is pulled from Google, what can you do? According to the latest research by BrightLocal, even responding to a review is becoming more important, with 30% naming this as a key indicator when judging local businesses.
The same principle applies to all reviews – responding can be vital!
5. Benefit from Operational Insights
One of the core benefits of any ORM strategy, is that you get to hear firsthand from the people who use your product or service, and they’ll be able to tell you exactly what they found good, and not so good.
This will help you identify trends which will help you make gradual, regular improvements to your company. For example, long wait times or multiple complaints about customer service at a specific location. You can use this information to make decisions about needed changes and prevent similar issues from happening in the future, which then spreads through more reviews and word of mouth. Such operational insights can help you hone employee training, as well.
6. Spread the Word with Flexible Reporting
Lastly, you’re going to want to report back on everything covered previously. The ability to create custom reports is essential for demonstrating outcomes of your reputation management efforts.
These vital visual representations of how you rank against competitors, and how your locations rank amongst each other, provide helpful insight into your strengths and weaknesses which you can use to your advantage.
Put your data into action and make it work for you. If you’re collecting this data, an effective ORM platform should be able to display this data in a meaningful way, helping you to understand where your business stands, and also plan for future improvements.
The Right Platform Makes All the Difference
Not all ORM platforms are the same. Find one that’s structured around the six pillars, and you’re off to a great start. Learn more about getting started with ORM with a free eBook from Reputation.com, available here.