Reputation.com's Top ORM & CX Trends for 2019

Each year, the team at Reputation.com come together and predict what the year will bring from an Online Reputation Management and a Customer Experience point-of-view.

I'm proud to work for the world's leading ORM & CX business, every day our platform helps hundreds of thousands of locations from many of the biggest organisations in the world to better engage with their customers. This information is essential for many reasons, including: It helps you better understand what your customers think about your brand, it helps you see how you actually look in the online jungle, and you also have a fantastic stream of feedback which you can put to use to help improve your operations.

Most companies already know that review management, social media and customer surveys are critical to their business, and cannot be treated as isolated pieces of data. But, even as the necessity for ORM grows, some businesses still have their heads in the sand with regards to whether or not they actually NEED to manage it day-to-day. 83% of consumers under 35 don’t trust advertising, celebrity endorsements or any of the traditional communication strategies -- so what their peers are writing about a brand online is what they use to decide whether to choose them or not.

Our Top 5 Predictions for 2019

Reputation.com understand this space like nobody else, so when the predictions are agreed-upon, they're going to be accurate in the long-term:

1. Building trust with consumers will be more critical than ever, requiring increased brand transparency and proactive customer engagement at the local level
2. Online reputation and CX management will merge, as a brand’s reputation and the experience it provides to customers are inexorably linked
3. Businesses will increasingly leverage AI and machine learning techniques to improve CX
4. Consolidation of ORM and CX point solutions will reduce risk, cost and complexity
5. Automation and mobile-first strategies will simplify ORM for businesses, enabling more immediate service recovery and customer engagement

As these trends continue to guide marketing leaders’ strategies in the coming year, other emerging trends can mean boom or bust for multi-location businesses.

The team have expanded and summarised these 5 trends in an eBook which you can download for free here.