James Spillane
Online customer reviews can make or break a business – even a relatively large business.
Consumers trust online customer reviews more than any other source of brand information except for recommendations from people they know, according to Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising report. Seventy percent of consumers trust online reviews, an increase of 15 percent over four years. People trust online reviews even more than news articles and other editorial content.
Surprisingly, many businesses ignore reviews. They simply let them happen on their own without responding to them, encouraging positive comments, or even monitoring them – unless a PR crisis erupts. Outside of restaurants and retail businesses that rely on reviews for their livelihood, most companies rarely monitor or promote reviews. Many not-for-profit organizations make the same error.
What’s the main reason businesses don’t monitor online reviews? Many organizations simply fail to delegate responsibility for growing and managing customer reviews to a certain person or department. The job could be assigned to PR, marketing, customer service, or sales. PR can – and should – start the decision-making discussion in its organization and lead the way in developing a policy that establishes who is responsible for online reviews. That policy should lay down a strategy for handling comments and promoting positive reviews.
Steps For An Online Review Strategy
These steps can help companies and not-for-profit organizations energize their online review strategies.
Solicit reviews. Ask customers an open-ended question on a social media site. For instance, ask the audience what they liked most about a product. Contests with small incentives can motivate customers to write reviews or to upload video testimonials. Displaying a message reading “Find Us on Yelp” (or other review site) on your website or at your business shows customers you have nothing to hide and encourages feedback.
Fill your profiles. Providing as much information as possible in online profiles, such as a photo, location, hours, and a food or service menu portrays the business as a professional outfit.
Attend to your regulars. Regular customers tend to post positive reviews. Offering discounts and other incentives can encourage them to write reviews.
Stress the positives. Placing favorable reviews prominently on your website, blog posts, and social media pages emphasizes their importance.
Respond to negative reviews. Failing to answer negative reviews indicates a lack of concern. Responding to negative reviews professionally and graciously with a heartfelt apology builds goodwill. Taking the discussion offline avoids a tit-for-tat public argument. Customers want honesty and generally accept a degree of negative comments.
Monitor comments. Social media listening is imperative to locate positive reviews that can be featured in owned media and negative reviews that call for quick responses. Assigning social listening as a part-time responsibility to a staff member works for some companies, but often fails because the employee has too many other responsibilities that seem more important. A social media monitoring service such as CyberAlert is usually more reliable, effective and cost-efficient that doing it yourself. The buzz monitoring services also provide metrics and reports that help their clients better understand their online reputation and guide the clients to take action to correct problems with products or services. By taking on the responsibility of regularly monitoring and managing customer review sites, PR can help protect the business’ reputation, make a larger contribution to the success of the business, and gain greater standing within management.
Bottom Line: Although online customer reviews are a critical PR and marketing tool, they are frequently neglected by many businesses. PR can take the lead in resolving that shortcoming by pressing their organizations to define what department is responsible for reviews and monitoring review sites for comments.
This article was originally published in the CyberAlert Blog.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by James Spillane.
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Great article! Perhaps one of the most effective and cheapest customer experience management tool are buyers’ reviews, especially when collected separately for each branch. Reviews very often contain relevant keywords, drawing attention to your product but their biggest strength lies in how Google perceives them. Each opinion written by a client contains unique wording and style. Search engines see that and prioritize your websites over other outlets.
Clients highly value personalised experience and even negative reviews can help companies showcase their initiative, thus boosting loyalty and satisfaction. While customer satisfaction surveys can be a great way to see where you’re standing with your service or product, they can be quite time-consuming and yield a low number of answers. A great alternative way of gathering feedback are review collecting companies. Ekomi and Bazaarvoice both offer great solutions to help you monitor customer satisfaction in real time and to keep your finger on the pulse when problems arise.
In my opinion this is the best way of monitoring your clients’ satisfaction as it offers a long-term insight into your product’s performance and most importantly – brings you more responses.
I have noticed that many companies still don’t have a delegated social media monitoring team. It seems like online monitoring is still unstructured and spread among departments, which can be very tricky and confusing for both employees and clients. Implementing an online monitoring tool and forming a team around it could be a helpful solution in such cases.
I can recommend Brand24 as such a tool because it really helps you in understanding the mentions and the information behind them, rather than simply presenting them to you. Report generation and the option for collaborative team work are quite useful when discussing in teams and planning your future marketing efforts, too. I would rather suggest that it is not just the PR team or someone else doing the monitoring, today companies should have a “Social team” that can respond in real time to any customer concern.
Is it now accepted practice to write a comment promoting your own employer without identifying yourself as an employee and masking your affiliation by using a Gmail or other generic email account? The practice seems to be getting more prevalent. It’s deceptive and should be stopped.