8 Quick Tips to improve customer experience with reviews management

8 Quick Tips to improve customer experience with reviews management

The internet has completely revolutionized the way you market your business. Simultaneously, the same technology is giving control in the hands of customers. Whether it’s talking about the latest products, commenting on a social media channel, or venting about customer service, today’s customers are leaving no stone unturned to take the conversations forward.

Quite evidently, running a business isn’t easy in today’s evolving digital landscapes. Clearly, it takes only one misstep to damage your company’s reputation permanently. It won’t be wrong to say that businesses get little room for error in today’s time. This is why online review management becomes a vital entity to thrive in the “new normal.”

However, you are only half right if you think online review management is only about limiting the damage of negative customer experiences. You can completely transform your customer experiences using online review management as a part of your business growth strategy. Wondering what we are talking about? Keep reading, and you’ll find out!

Overview

Even in 2022, businesses can run smoothly if their customers talk about them. Word of mouth might have taken the digital route. But even a single online review can shake your foundation. Here are some statistics to prove the point. 

• According to the Local Consumer Review Study, a customer reads around 10 reviews before trusting a local business. 
• Businesses can lose around 22% of business if they find even one negative article or review on their first page of search results.

In order to survive, you need to be aware of and protect your online reputation. Moreover, local businesses need it more than ever now. According to a survey, more than 85% of customers use the internet to research before purchasing. 

However, local businesses are facing a lot of challenges, which is making them not only lose business but also customers’ trust and loyalty. 

Decoding Challenges

Many owners often think about sales and marketing when they start a business. But local businesses fail to understand that they aren’t the only resource for growing and scaling your business. Here’s how ignoring online review management is turning out to be a challenging situation for many local brands. 

Ignoring customer experiences resulting in loss of business:

Customer experiences aren’t only about marketing and the sales funnel. They need to be happy about your services after they buy a service or a product. However, a lot of businesses are leaving negative reviews on the sidelines. For example, a brand Target experiences a situation where a Facebook user started a new page posting about Target’s customer service team. The user began mocking customers who had complaints about the company’s gender-neutral signage.

Image Credit: hubspot.com

While the company didn’t create the account, their unavailability caused misunderstandings, and users started questioning their brand’s values. However, more than 50% of users track down negative reviews before making any purchase decisions, as per the research. You will find so many brands that lost business because they didn’t heed what was happening online. 

Not responding at all review sites or responding in a disrespectful manner:

Local businesses are so much involved in their business personally that a negative comment often frustrates them. Moreover, it is impossible to track every online review about your company. Many sites like Google, Yahoo, Yelp, BBB, and others where customers leave comments about their experiences. 

Further, staying active on every social media platform isn’t easy for a business owner. All of this results in loss of business, credibility, and loyalty. For example, a company called, The Union Street Guest House in New York threatened the guests with a 500 dollar fine if they left any negative reviews. This resulted in a backlash and led to an online rating of 1.5 on Yelp.

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Your brand’s online reputation is a valuable asset. So, if you miss out on customer reviews or don’t do it in the right way, it can impact your business in many ways than just loss of revenue. 

Unable to capture customer feedback:

A successful business understands how to capture the customer reviews and acts on them to take care of the concerns and ensure client retention. However, not every local business understands the process of collecting and capturing feedback. Most of them end up doing this instead:

• They make the feedback about themselves rather than about customers.
• They get fixated with only one or two metrics.
• They ignore cognitive bias when doing a survey
• They end up asking yes/no questions
• They fail to own negative feedback

In fact, more than 80% of top performers said that getting feedback data is one of the most critical challenges any business faces.

Social Proof is missing on websites and landing pages:

Websites and landing pages are critical for converting your consumers into paying customers. While many businesses tend to do everything right on this front, they forget about one crucial thing, customer testimonials. It’s like there is no credibility to prove your claims. How can you expect your customer to trust you? Remember that product reviews are 12 times more trusted than stellar product descriptions. Still, many businesses don’t have the right way to show their customers they care. 

For example, in a study about Hammacher Schlemmer, when there was a review added next to the items, there was an increase in the conversion rate by 380% compared to the ones with no reviews at all. However, not every local business knows the strategies to integrate them in a way that helps them improve revenue. 

This is why online review management is essential now. 

Presenting solutions to boost online presence and manage online reviews

When you think about online review management, it feels overwhelming since there is so much to do and less time. However, if you have the right strategies in place, you will always stay on the right path. Here’s what typically helps.

Accelerate the process of collecting feedback:

Everyone wants to have better sales. But finding a customer loyalty base is something that not everyone can do. So, how to enhance the social proof of your brand? The step starts with collecting feedback from your customers. However, not every customer is ready to share the review. This is why you need to outline a process for getting there. Remember, if you don’t have a clear intention, any feedback won’t serve any purpose.

Before you begin it, you must answer the following questions:

• What phase of customer experience do you wish to improve?
• What’s your end goal with the data you can collect?
• Which customer review channels align with your goals?

Clearly, feedback isn’t something you can create on a whim. It requires strategy and end goals so that you can extract maximum benefits. You can opt for different ways like:

1. You can opt for short-form surveys or long-form surveys. However, make sure you follow some simple rules like: Ask questions related to your goals, opt for open-ended questions, avoid any leading questions.

Image Credit: helpscout.com

2. You can also go for email contact forms to gather candid customer reviews. Just keep expectations clear so they are willing to share feedback. To build trust, you can send short sentences like “We will get back to you in hours/ days” to build trust. Also, organize your email feedback.

3. You can also send personalized responses using one-to-one requests. You can also ask for more personalized feedback. You can also turn such feedback into happiness reports.

Image Credit: helpscout.com

4. You can also go for customer interviews to get stories that will bring color and nuance to your data. For this, you need to keep open-ended questions as if you are talking to your best friend.

5. Use the potential of social media to grow your reviews base. For instance, you can use comments mentioned on social media networks and use them in different ways.

Add review widget:

If you are a brand with so many product pages, using a review widget will help you showcase your customer reviews in a format that will help you improve the conversions. However, you must design it to match the look and feel of your store. Including this will help you showcase your reviews gathered from trusted sites like Google, Expedia, Booking.com, BBB, Yelp and allow you to flaunt the positive customer experiences. 

Display your online reviews on location landing pages:

If you are running a business at one location, you know the steps already. However, if you are doing business from multiple locations, you need to collect reviews and improve your bottom-line revenue.

Let’s not forget that social proof is more like a psychological phenomenon. Customer testimonials and reviews act like a booster for customers to buy from you. For example, more than 60% of people often look at a product review before purchasing. In the same way, if you do that for your location landing pages, it will boost that your brand works well in their location.

Respond to customer reviews quickly:

By now, you know better than anyone the importance of reviews. But not many companies engage with such reviews online. If your customer is ensuring to talk about your brand, you must at least show them you care. Reviews are a great way to engage directly with your customers. And positive reviews about your brand are a great way to make the bonding even more.

Image Credit: meegle.com

But you must never stop there. There should be an instant reply to the negative feedback as well. However, many businesses tend to delete negative customer reviews. In fact, around 30% of businesses delete original negative reviews. Your idea should be to respond to those reviews and find out what went wrong. 

You must embrace the negative reviews by acknowledging and apologizing instead of grudging. The fact that you are ready to make some changes will speak volumes about your brand. But most importantly, you need to be quick to respond. If you miss out on the timing, it can severely impact your business and its revenue. 

Image Credit: mttr.io

How Sage titans can help you manage online reviews and deliver a better customer experience?

A lot of online reviews management firms focus solely on the reviews. We at Sage Titans have the expertise in helping local businesses to handle their business uncertainty and executing strategies that improve business standing in the market. Our company will work over different strategies that will help you to:

1. Improve visibility on the sites where it matters.
2. Boosts online reputation management 
3. Setting goals and aligning strategies 
4. Improve content creation to match those goals
5. Provide SEO-optimized solutions that increase the organic ranking of the website.

In short, we will ensure that your brand’s reputation builds credibility, builds trust, improves search rankings, lowers the risk of damage to the reputation, and eventually boosts sales, revenue, and ROI. 

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