OBJECTIVES
This analysis provides:
• Definitive statistics for why managing your online reputation is essential to drive customer loyalty, acquisition, and revenue.
• Six ways you can leverage online customer reviews to improve customer experience.
• An overview of the business benefits for managing your online reputation.
APPROACH
IntelliShop recommends:
• Online Reputation Management
Leverage online ratings and reviews to fully understand the customer experience. Unsolicited customer feedback and competitor data can improve operational performance, enhance customer loyalty, and increase sales.
• Social Media Monitoring
Technology solutions that can help your brand find customer reviews, comments and queries allowing your company to address them speedily, mitigate a potential
Online Reviews Provide Actionable Insights
To understand the success of your business depends on the voice of your customers. Did you know?
• 93% of customers are influenced by online reviews (The Drum)
• 82% of consumers are less likely to use a business after seeing negative reviews (BrightLocal)
• Businesses experience a 5-9% increase in revenue for every 1 star increase in reviews (Harvard Magazine)
• People will pay 22% more for certain products if a company has a good reputation (MarketWatch)
Understanding your customers’ experience from online feedback is what you need to increase revenue, loyalty, and acquisition strategies. Here are six ways you can leverage online customer reviews.
1. Respond to Reviews to Keep and Win Customers Back
•Rapid response is everything when it comes to negative consumer sentiment online. In fact, 53% of consumers expect brands to respond to their feedback within an hour.
•Studies also show that 80% of customers will return if you’ve treated them fairly. If you do not respond at all, you risk losing them as a customer.
•An unhappy customer will become a loyal consumer if you acknowledge and address their complaint and do it quickly.
2. Analyze Reviews to Identify and Solve Issues
•If a store location showcases a noticeable decrease in sales, customer experience is likely one of the contributing factors. Analyzing the reviews for this location can provide valuable intelligence on customer service, positive or negative customer sentiment, as well as employee performance.
•For example, after analyzing the reviews for one store location that experienced a recent drop in revenue, we found that one employee was consistently providing rude customer service. People were including this person by name in their reviews. This information allowed the client to have a conversation with that employee and sales began to increase after this issues was addressed.
•But how can you analyze and identify issues in your reviews without reading every single one? We use a review monitoring software that scans and categorizes each review using natural language processing so we can easily and quickly identify keywords your customers are using over and over again. We analyze those keywords, get to the root
3. Crisis Management
•The rise of cancel culture has put many businesses at risk of falling out of favor with customers with just one review or social media post. Every customer interaction has the potential to lead to a negative review that could put your brand at risk of going viral for all the wrong reasons, which can be tough to come back from.
•In fact, Yelp recently announced they are going to start flagging restaurants accused of racist behavior. Sure, this will prevent more people from writing potentially false reviews about you, however this action is putting all of the power in the hands of the reviewer and not the business with this new feature. By monitoring your reviews, you’ll know about this quickly so you can take swift action.
4. Use Reviews to Get Real-Time Feedback on Products
•Your reviews can be a quick glimpse into how a certain product or service is received by your customers. A salad dressing company made a huge package design update to a beloved product and put it on shelves. They quickly came to realize that the new bottle design was cutting their customers’ hands when they tried to open it.
•Something that could have gone on for months and lost them hundreds of thousands of customers was quickly discovered and corrected by listening and reacting to their customers.
•Additionally, you can use review insights for market research to spark an idea for a new product. By identifying themes within your reviews, you may find out that people really miss an old product or are consistently recommending you make something new or make a tweak to an existing product. When Chick-Fil-A discontinued their classic BBQ and replaced it with a smokehouse sauce with no warning, customers spoke out and Chick-Fil-A listened by bringing the sauce back, building an even more loyal customer base because they felt heard.
5. Competitor Intelligence
•You can use review sentiment analysis to quickly give you a snapshot of what words are trending in your competitors’ customer reviews.
•Exactly how can this work? One client wanted us to monitor a specific competitor to see if we could uncover anything that may help spark ideas for a new marketing campaign. We were able to learn that people often used the words “friendly, polite and fast” when leaving reviews for the competition, and the word “fresh” was a common theme for our client. Recognizing this, we recommended our client focus on the fact their food is fresh in order entice customers to try their food over the competition.
•You can also use your competitors’ reviews to understand how customers perceive their products, atmosphere value, customer experience and more. Armed with this information, you can make more calculated business decisions to provide the best customer experience by learning from your competitors’ successes and mistakes.
6. Get Found When Customers Need You
•Near me search results are a powerful way for your consumers to quickly locate a store near them for a product or service.
•For example, when your computer stops working. You may do a search for “computer repair near me.” What you may not realize is the top results Google shows you may not even be the closest locations.
•The top three Google-recommended places are going to be the ones that have the highest star rating, the most reviews and the most review responses.
Business Benefits
Overall, investing in online review management services enhances your digital customer experience. In fact, studies show that those who are leading and investing in digitizing their customer experiences across online and social channels see returns on average 3x higher than those who are not.
IntelliShop is here to help your business create an effective strategy to manage its online reputation. Our team of world class consultants will listen to the voice of your customer, to understand your audience and deliver insights that benefit your bottom line.
We offer a full-service, online reputation management solution not only monitors 100+ review sites and social media channels, but also 150+ million other sources to get a full picture of how your brand, locations, products, mobile applications, workplace and more are perceived online.
• Actionable consumer insights to drive revenue
• Improve customer experience to drive loyalty
• Competitive analytics to drive to the top of local search
• Mitigate risk and crisis control to drive brand equity
No tools for you to manage, no dashboard with meaningless data for you to interpret. Just intelligence that helps you focus on making better business decisions that drive results.
