Every business entity requires skillful application of advanced tactics in reputation management so that it can achieve its targeted sales and production goals.
Reputation is a crucial supporting pillar to every business. Great reviews and comments help build your business and your products. Conversely, bad ones can be very destructive and cost you more money than you could imagine. In this high-stakes environment, there are tricks of the trade that you can help you form and cement your credibility and brand standing.
Whether you are just starting your online business and wondering how things on the internet work, or you have already spend a lot of time on the web, you may have ideas about how important your online reputation is.
Your reputation reflects your capability as a service provider and how effective and useful whatever your product or service is. It is the foundation of your business: it will directly affect your sales, your profit, and ultimately your bank account. Developing a great reputation is essential for anyone who wants to engage in the online selling world and in this piece, we shall look at some advanced tactics in reputation management.
Ensure Quality Service and Products
To get good reviews, feedback, and comments, you must be able to provide customers with good products. Regardless of whether you are the manufacturer or the distributor, you should answer the following questions before selling products to your beloved customers:
Is it fully functional and capable of attaining appropriate performance goals?
Is it safe to use? Are there any risk factors for the user?
Are sufficient specifications included in the package?
Does it contain a comprehensive user’s manual?
Manufacturers
More detailed discussions on how to ensure delivery of quality goods are provided in the following articles: Five Ways to Ensure Quality Manufacturing — Sourcing Success ’ Recognizing The Benefits of Standardization ’ The Importance of Packaging ’ 3 Ways to Improve Communications with Suppliers’ Classifying Defects.
Service Providers
Service providers must ensure:
To have clear and easy-to-understand terms and conditions. Ensure all necessary information is obtained from the client before work commences, and avoid repeated contacts for additional client input after commencing work.
Deliver the exact services within the deadline specified in the terms and conditions.
Be honest on what you can actually provide, do not overrate your services. By doing this, you can ensure that you would not disappoint any of your clients.
Provide Remarkable Customer Service
Customers will praise your goods with good reviews not just because they are satisfied with what you provide, but also because they like the way you provide it. This is where customer service comes into play.
You must always be willing to answer questions and comments no matter how positive or negative they are. Be sure to respond to them right away or as soon as possible: research shows that customers typically give up after a week of waiting for response to a complaint, and then go elsewhere. Unanswered queries also reflect badly on your brand name, fostering an image of arrogance and disregard for client welfare.
The more you value your clients, the more they will be loyal to you and your goods. Customer loyalty and appreciation bring in not only good reviews but also word-or-mouth referrals. Satisfied clients can and do translate to increased footfall and revenue, not only via repeat visit but through proliferation of recommendations and new business. Recommendations from happy clients have the ability to spread to venues no marketing can reach, through relatives and friends.
Get to the Root of Bad Comments
By uncovering where the problem started, you can formulate solutions to avoid the same thing happening again. Analyze customer complaints both to address and prevent re-occurrence.
Your business is only as strong as your weakest point. Negative feedback can be a blessing in disguise if handled well, as it offers the opportunity not only to locate weaknesses within the business, but also to impress the client with the excellence and celerity of your response. Some of the best brand ambassadors in terms of word-of-mouth and online recommendations are garnered through client interactions that started off negative, but were turned around into positive experiences that stand out from others. Take the case of a serious security breach in credit card transactions experienced by Target. The CEO wrote a letter of apology to the customers, and further, extended a 10% discount to clients who repeat visited on the following weekend. The breach could have been catastrophically bad publicity, but ended up having little to no effect on the company’s bottom line. However, a business with a preponderance of negative reviews will struggle to establish a good brand identity. All companies would want to keep their ratings high for the majority.
Learn To Handle Inevitable Destructive Comments
Great products and excellent customer service provision may minimize the destructive comments.This is however no guarantee that there will be no bad ones anymore. You will always gain unavoidable bad reviews from your customers no matter what you do. Some of those comments and reviews might be technically unjustified, as in customers who didn’t read the terms and conditions or the user’s manual, some are from power-trippers, land some are caused by costumers’ misinterpretation about the goods you provide. You can’t please everyone. Learn to sort out feedback between constructive and destructive ones. By the time you are in the business for long enough, you will be able to learn how to be thick-skinned against those unhelpful comments.
Call The Professionals
No-one can help you with developing your reputation better than a reputation developer. If you want the best for your business, there is the option of hiring a professional to do it. Most reputation developers offer a wide selection of packages which includes specific services and prices, from which you can find one that suits your business’s needs.
Some of their basic strategies and tactics to improve your brand name may include:
Optimization of the use of search engines and landing pages;
Sending private SMS and emails to your clients to ask for their feedback and reviews;
Managing and filtering bad comments and reviews in your page;
Seeking good reviews on other platforms such as social media which will make your business more attractive for the customers and;
Engaging you in customers’ campaigns and public relations activities
Reputation developers live and breathe handling and evaluating reviews. However, name and brand reputation creation doesn’t happen overnight. With patience and persistence, a reputation of great value can be built up, giving good returns on the initial investment in hiring the reputation developer. Highly respected businesses use the same tactics both to gain new clients and retain old ones, turning both the process of selling goods and growing assets into a faster, easier, more streamlined process.
If your online reputation is the foundation of your online business, then online reputation developers are the ones who can build that foundation.
For more tips and discussions regarding reputation development and management, you can visit the following pages:
Successful implementation of ethical reputation development strategies require the direct focus of a business on its clients’ interests.
With the advent of Internet and Google, almost all businesses now have an online presence, giving tremendous leverage. Online companies have both advantages and disadvantages over bricks and mortar stores. Instant, worldwide accessibility is a huge advantage. Credibility based on online customer reviews and ratings can be a vulnerability. Online reviews from customers have become one of the key metrics for prospective customers in making purchase decisions. Thus, reputation development and maintenance is as vital as the initial setup of the presence, without which the business model will go nowhere.
Popular trip review website TripAdvisor is a repository of reviews of hotels, flights, restaurants, pubs and sightseeing places from across the world. Hundreds of hotels and restaurants have benefited from increased footfall via positive reviews from satisfied customers, and many have lost customers because of bad reviews and ratings. In the digital age, reputation development is a crucial strategy for every business to amplify their business reach and profitability.
Online review websites like Google Reviews, Yelp, and Facebook TripAdvisor are enabling customers to voice their feelings on products and services. The online reviews are directly impacting businesses, positively or negatively.
Best practices for reputation development
Implement an Online Reputation Development Strategy
Building an online reputation goes far beyond delivering best business value to customers. Many companies confine themselves to knee-jerk reactions and patch-up remedies in response to negative customer comments, without ever looking into the underlying causes of the complaints. In ignoring the opportunity negative feedback affords in pinpointing endemic flaws in the business model, these entities lay themselves, open to repeated (and probably increasing) customer dissatisfaction. The approach to negative comments must be aggressively proactive, and work in tandem with a coordinated strategy to business reputation development.
Businesses can choose to set up an in-house team to undertake this task or can bring in external agencies. Reputation development agencies often offer a time effective and ultimately economical solution to what is, after all, a specialist job. A cohesive business reputation development strategy will leverage the business model in degrees of magnitude hard to achieve by almost any other means.
Use Social Review Platforms
Current social media scenarios must be understood, and sequential steps taken towards reputation development. Log in to the social media platforms like Google+ Twitter, Facebook, Quora or any online consumer forum websites and product/service review blogs. All too often, a haphazard clutter of consumer concerns and grievances lie mostly unaddressed on a company’s site: a trail of mismanagement and bad publicity. Many businesses spread themselves over numerous social media platforms and fail to keep on top of all the rapid changes.
Twitter, trending as a quick support platform using hashtags and business handles, is acting as a complaints boomerang. Being an open platform where anyone can access and view anything using hashtags, its impact on businesses can be positive or negative. Businesses failing to match up to customer expectations and subsequently receiving negative online reviews will inevitably see a downfall in profitability. Reputation development is sorely needed here. This is no easy task, as it involves not only addressing the initial concerns but also taking them several steps further to satisfy and go beyond customer expectations.
Proactively Respond to Customers
Keeping the communication channels open and active them is lifeblood to an online business. Despite irrefutable and damning evidence that neglect of complaints directly impacts the bottom line, swathes of companies forge on without any remedial steps, as this Forbes article notes. An unaddressed Google review is a gaping wound in a company’s reputation. The statistic that 89% of customers who have a negative experience with a company start doing business with a competitor should be enough to raise the hairs on the back of any entrepreneur’s neck and galvanize them into action.
This case of air ticketing website BudgetAir.com on Trip Advisor has a thread currently 317 posts long on an initial bad review, without any intervention from the company. This is hardly a good example of online reputation management. An airline ticket costing hundreds of dollars is a significant purchase, and customers will be almost guaranteed to shop around and read reviews prior to shelling out; even more so in the customer base looking for cheap seats. The negative impact on Budget Air’s bottom line this unaddressed comment will have had is enormous.
Persistence
The journey of profitability improvement through reputation development is one of persistence. It involves being vigilant and aware of your brand identity. All tarnish from negative online reviews must be rubbed with care into burnished, satisfied resolutions. In the cut-throat environment of the online rating war, none can afford to lay down arms for any length of time.
Immediately Deal with Fake Reviews
Unscrupulous sabotage from competitors is no novelty in the business environment and has transitioned naturally from the physical world into the online. Rivals posting as anonymous or fake users can and do leave devastating reviews, groundless in the foundation, solely to damage the business. One of the remits of reputation development is to identify, confront and eliminate these serious threats to the health of an organization. The process may at worst involve litigation. Press releases can act as a precursor or alternative to this unpalatable but sometimes necessary step.
Conclusion
The process of reputation development is not a one-off exercise, and requires a considerable amount of planning and framing strategy. Deepening understanding of its workings and value is crucial to the development of an online business presence, just as much as ignorance or neglect of it will most surely inflict harm.
Reflect on your business operations and let us help you improve your business’ reputation.
The rising trend of online reviews in local search results has made it mandatory for every business to prioritize pro-active improvement strategies for their web credentials.
Reputation management has remained a key component of business strategy since the advent of the internet. Most enterprises would want to increase the number of positive reviews online while downplaying the negative ones. Because Google ranks businesses in local search results based on how likely are the consumers to recommend it, almost everyone is busy pushing for positive statements. Latest techniques proven to grow businesses are aimed at not only managing your reputation but also at improving it.
Importance of Reviews
Purchase Consideration
More than three-quarters of all consumers consult reviews prior to purchase. Online review platforms on websites, Google, and social media among others has revolutionized consumer decision making.
Ranking
Google uses reviews to rank businesses. More positive reviews will translate to better rankings and higher visibility through search engines, which have adopted algorithms that filter out fake reviews and use legitimate ones to assess the reputation. The Australian market is competitive and the higher the number of reviews, the higher the chances of being seen by potential customers online.
Taste
High ranking alone is not enough for most customers. They want to ‘feel’ the service when ascertaining how the business will meet their needs. That’s where the reviews come in. For instance, a busy customer may want to focus on how long they might have to wait before being served, not simply the quality of service. Reviews give an insight to the business along with the unique viewpoint of any given demographic’s preference. It’s a question of taste as well as of facts.
Changing Times
Online reputation mobility is notoriously rapid. Maintaining an established reputation may not be enough to stay afloat against aggressive market disruptors. The modern consumer is not a tame beast that will go for an offering simply because it meets requirements. It needs to feel the satisfaction of having made the right choice, picked the best. A business with a slew of good reviews last year but online silence this year will raise consumer suspicions. Unless your online reputation is not only good but also current, you may soon be forgotten.
When you began your business, you had a dream. A vision of being the best. ‘Now’ is always the time to work towards that. The process starts with action. More and more people use physical shops to view and assess products, subsequently making the purchase from the comfort of their beds courtesy of online shopping. Developing your online reputation may be your only hope of staying in business.
Importance of Developing a Reputation
Developing your reputation will enable you to:
Survive rapid changes in the business world.
Grow the value of your investment with increased sales, enabling business expansion.
Stay dynamic in a market where new competitors sprout day and night.
How to Improve Your Reputation
Now that you understand the need for reputation development, how exactly do you make it happen? Here are several proven ways that have helped businesses not only in Australia but throughout the world.
Appropriate Reaction
You may have several reviews by now. Initial reactions are vital in dealing with both existing and future comments.
Avoid automatically generated responses unless absolutely necessary for volume management. Provide personal responses wherever possible.
Genuinely appreciate the positive reviews while acknowledging the negative ones.
Explain why and what you will do to sort out any issues, and follow through to a satisfactory conclusion for the customer.
Prove your end-game is always customer satisfaction.
Appropriate Action
Actions speak louder than words. When a customer points out a problem, take it up as soon as possible and work towards a resolution.
Repeated complaints on the same issue from multiple customers is a warning-bell to potential clients and to be avoided at all costs.
Use the reviews as a mirror to better your business. Harness the good reviews acknowledge your strengths and focus on them.
Collective Effort
When it comes to working towards a goal, you will need everyone on board. Let your employees understand what you stand for and your goals.
Send a clear message that the most important person in the business is not you but the customer, and they need to do everything in their power to ensure client satisfaction.
Contacting Customers
After a purchase or delivery of a service, thank the client respectfully and ask for their feedback. Such gestures are perceived as genuine concern and will result in positive reviews that will improve your reputation.
Facilitate communication to help field potential poor reviews. Skilled handling may not only satisfy a disgruntled client but even turn them full circle into a promoter.
Request permission from customers who leave positive feedback to quote their comments on your website. Make your ‘testimonials’ tab easily accessible.
Customer Complaints
If customers can’t find a venue on your site to express their feelings about your business there are a plethora of other fora where they can vent frustrations. Ensure you have a platform for them to post their experience directly on your website. It will help you respond (ideally) to all of them, and also function as damage control in containing negative feedback rather than facing the impossible task of collecting scattered discontent from all over the net, which will invisibly undermine your business.
Net Promoter Score
Having understood how reputation can be improved, you need to know how to assess this growth. The best way currently is using the Net Promoter Score® (NPS). It’s based on the concept of the likelihood of consumers to recommend you to other people around them. It is done simply by asking customers how likely are they to recommend the business on a scale of O to 10. Those ranking it from O to 6 are called detractors while those ranking 9s and 10s are called promoters. NPS is the percentage difference between the promoters and detractors.
Based on this concept, you can assess your standing and strategize on how to boost it. NPS has proved useful for many businesses, and you too can capitalize on it to take your organization to the next level.
Conclusion
The age of internet may be dangerous to the survival of some businesses but the key to growth for those who know how to use it. An online reputation built on reviews not only needs to be managed but actively improved to thrive in these competitive times.
