Improving customer experience through online reputation management

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Reviews of your business online serve two purposes: they attract more customers and they enable customer service improvement.
According to a Spiegel study, 95% of customers read online posts before placing an order. 85% of the audience trust resources like Yelp, TripAdvisor and Amazon.

Monitoring brand mentions online to upgrade customer service

Customer experience consists of two elements: usability and customer service. The first component relates to the process of customer interaction with company products, and the second is the quality of service and customer support.

diagram showing two elements of customer experience: user experience and customer service

Your company can't develop if you don't know what your customers think of your team, service, and merchandise. Analyzing customer reviews is a good way to learn how your audience responds to your product or service.
Customer comments can help you:

Identify what customers expect from their experience with your company's service
For example, reducing the response time to customer questions. You could consider using a chat bot or adding members to your team.
Find customer insights into the true motivation for purchasing
This info improves advertising campaigns, helps you target your audience, tailors service, and develops creative and interesting promotional materials.
Track the latest trends
Trends help your company find new points of contact with the customer and improve your product.
Respond to and resolve customer issues faster
If a company has too many negative reviews left unanswered, it can develop a reputation for bad service, lose customers and business partners, and incur losses.

Customer feedback helps you understand how to enhance your customer experience by boosting usability and providing better service. Therefore, monitoring should be constant — this is not a one-time action. You can analyze brand mentions using the following tools:

Manual monitoring. First you need to collect keywords that customers search to find your company. This is usually the name of the brand and product or service. Then, search for each keyword on Google and look at the results on review sites, thematic forums, social networks and so on. This is a lengthy process and is suitable for companies new to the market that have not yet developed a large audience of customers;

Specialized services. Monitoring tools such as brandwatch.com allow you to work with large volumes of information and monitor various sources of customer reviews, including online media. Some programs have functions for recognizing the tone of comments and automatic alerts if new mentions appear, which greatly facilitates monitoring.

You must entrust this procedure to a dedicated person on your team, or contact a SERM (search engine reputation management) agency. Specialists have experience working with various projects, so they know which service and which settings are best for your business. You will receive a full report and a list of recommendations and what changes are necessary to strengthen the image of your company and your customer service.

How do negative reviews help boost customer service?

For example, you may learn that you provide too little information about your product. Internet shopping makes it hard to see and feel items in real life. If your website has only one photo of a pair of shoes, an item of clothing, or any other goods, you may fail to fulfill customer expectations. To correct this situation and create a better service experience for your customers, add more photos from different angles. Images featuring an item worn by a model are ideal because they give more information to the customer and help them make a choice.

In addition to constantly monitoring customer comments, you must constantly communicate with customers and respond to their complaints as part of good customer service. Depending on how professionally you do this, your reputation will rise or fall. In an ideal scenario, after good service, a dissatisfied customer may not only delete or edit a review, but could become an advocate of your brand. For these purposes, it is better to hire a professional community manager on your team or contact a reputable agency. The specialist will solve problems, enhance service, and build a strong community on social networks.

5 Ways to Boost Customer Service

Your business needs a smart customer service improvement strategy:

1

Examine your customer's behavior
You need to understand all the customer's steps in the path leading to their purchase. How and through what channels does the customer most often come into contact with your brand, items, or service? Online search, social networks, third-party review sites? After analyzing the channels and their effectiveness, you can more effectively build communication with your customers and provide stronger service.
2

Ask your customers to leave reviews
Customer reviews are critical in attracting new customers and business partners. If you regularly ask your audience to leave comments about their experience with your merchandise and service, you will not only increase your image but also get a lot of UGC (user-generated content).

Gathering feedback can be done using an email newsletter, if you have your own customer base. Post on social networks or add a form on your website. Various one-time incentives can serve as a motivator, for example, free delivery, valuable information (for example, if you have a grocery store, this might be a small guide with recipes for your products), a discount on an item or service, and so on.
3

Identify possible points of contact with your audience
Determine if there are any other channels of communication with the customer where you are not yet interacting. For example, if you have a hotel chain, most likely customers expect that you will post information about the business such as the service of booking rooms on AirBnB.
4

Create an effective content strategy
Analyze search results, learn your customers' most frequent questions, and investigate any barriers to purchasing decisions. Then you can create a content strategy that will anticipate the customer's questions. This might be an FAQ sheet about your service or an instruction video on how to use a specific product.
5

Contact the SERM agency
Specialists will conduct a reputation audit of your brand and competing companies to form a comprehensive plan for customer service improvement.

Specialists at Topface Media agency will help to conduct a reputation audit of your brand and competing companies to form a comprehensive plan for customer service improvement.

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To summarize

Monitoring brand mentions on the internet helps identify customer insights, find more points of contact with the audience and get feedback about problems with service quality. You must analyze this information and implement any conclusions to enhance the quality of your service and the overall experience of your audience.
Negative reviews and resolving customer service problems can provide valuable insights. Never ignore negative comments! A customer will wait for your response for a day, after which it will be more difficult to establish contact with them. Read more about how your service team should respond to positive and negative comments online in our other article.
Motivate customers to leave comments so you can not only get more reviews but also improve your position in search engines.
Seek help from a reputation service. Professional managers will monitor brand mentions, reply promptly, and alert you to any complex or interesting cases so your service department can respond. You will gain control over the responses of satisfied current customers and interested potential customers.