When buying a product or service what do you look at to determine its quality and fit for your needs? Most likely you go online and check out the customer reviews for the product, service, or company. Statistics show that 95 percent of buyers check reviews before making a purchase.
This is why it is important to know what your customer reviews say about your business, products, or services.
Unfortunately, many businesses don’t take customer reviews seriously. This could be negatively affecting their revenue. If you have happy customers, you should leverage them by soliciting their five-star ratings of your services or products.
Additionally, you should seek out any negative customer experiences and resolve them before the clients post the dissatisfaction online. Review monitoring should be something your company does regularly.
Negative reviews help improve your products or services to ensure your business continues thriving. But potential clients can decide not to buy from you if they see even one negative review. Keep reading to learn how proactive review management ensures your company continues to build a solid reputation.
The first reason why you should track your customer reviews is that they are one of the best tools you can use to improve your business. Honest feedback from a third party will give you awareness of what your company’s strengths and weaknesses are.
Positive reviews highlight areas of your business that you should promote. They may also help you choose which products to continue selling. Negative reviews, on the other hand, are a great way to know your areas of improvement.
Reviews may also show you who your strongest and weakest employees are. They give you the insight to develop suitable training and performance management programs for employees. When negative reviews are properly handled you can end up with lifelong customers and brand ambassadors.
Another reason why you must track customer reviews is that the reviews your business gets help shape your brand reputation. Online reviews give consumers confidence that they are dealing with a genuine company.
If you don’t stay on top of what people are saying about your business your reputation may get irreparably damaged. Customer review monitoring helps you to take part in the conversation that shapes how people perceive you.
Customer reviews also affect your bottom line. So you must manage them to get the best returns possible. Research shows that sales pages that have customer reviews record 138 percent more sales than those without reviews.
Also, the average spend on pages with reviews is 159 percent more than on pages without them. The potential for increased sales should be reason enough for you to manage your consumer reviews.
If you want to increase the number of hits your website gets then customer review monitoring is a must. 63% of online retailers have reported that customer reviews have had a positive impact on their SEO rankings. This is because customer reviews are one of the major metrics search engines use when ranking websites on search results.
Your customer reviews are a great source of information about your products or services. For instance, a customer may not know which size pants to buy. But pictures and comments from other buyers may give them more insight into how the trousers will fit them.
Review monitoring and responding to consumer reviews also allows you to give more information about your brand and products. Your comments may help other consumers make better decisions on what items to buy.
Now that you know the importance of customer review monitoring, you may be wondering how you can start doing it. Read on for some of the best tips on how you should handle customer review monitoring.
1. Register Your Business On the Top Review Websites
The first tip for customer review monitoring is to enlist your business on the top customer review sites. These sites include:
2. Ask Your Customers for Reviews
Generally, customers that have had incredibly positive or negative experiences will go out their way to leave a review. For the rest of your clients, you may have to ask them to leave a review on your chosen platforms.
Positive reviews can influence potential clients to buy your product or service. So the more positive reviews you have the better.
Remember that some customers may find it inauthentic to leave reviews on your website or social media pages. This is why you should also give them an option to leave reviews on third-party business sites such as Google My Business.
3. Use Gated Review Management
When soliciting customer reviews, a company can use either a gated or non-gated approach. With gated review management the client is first asked whether they had a good experience or if they liked your product or service. Those that answer yes are directed to your chosen rating platform to give their rating of your services. Those that answer no get connected to a customer service agent to help resolve their complaint.
With Non-Gated review management clients, go directly to the rating platform and post their review (whether negative or positive). A gated approach to online review management will yield better returns for your business as there will be fewer negative reviews to discourage other buyers. You'll also get a chance to change and correct any negative experiences that clients have.
4. Always Do A Root Cause Analysis on Negative Reviews
Whenever you receive any negative reviews, your team should take the time to do a root cause analysis on what caused the complaint. Once you identify and correct the root cause, you should have fewer negative reviews and your customer satisfaction ratings will increase. Handling negative reviews without dealing with their root cause will keep you in a cycle of placating disgruntled customers for the same issue.
5. Use Google Alerts For Review Monitoring
Google Alerts is a great tool for online reputation management. You can set it to send you an alert every time someone posts anything to do with your brand, products, or services. This gives you a heads up to react fast to any positive or negative reviews online.
6. Use A Review Monitoring Tool
Review monitoring can be too much of a hassle for most companies to manage. So our last tip for how to track your consumer reviews is to use review monitoring tools. These are software that can track reviews from different platforms and record, analyze, and store them in one place.
Some lower-cost Softwares simply track customer reviews on different problems and alert you if there is a negative review posted. Costlier review management tools have more options such as engaging with negative reviewers, soliciting more positive reviews, and using customer relations management personnel to increase positive ratings.
Customer reviews are a great tool for businesses to increase their revenue and build their brand reputation. Businesses that want to grow their market share and revenue must proactively seek out and respond to customer reviews about their products and services. But online review management can be a daunting task for most small businesses.
This is why many companies are purchasing review management software and tools to manage their reviews. Review monitoring software makes it easy to discover and respond to online customer reviews as fast as possible. They can also be used to generate consumer reviews by approaching your consumers via text or email for product or service feedback.
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