Most businesses have mastered the online reputation management process; they are collecting reviews, responding to them, managing negative ones, engaging in responsible online conversations and they are supporting all this with offline customer support. They have their act together but the process does not end here; they need to always be ahead of the customer to ensure that they remain in charge of their online image.
Online Reputation Improvement with Modern Business Approach
Since the digital scene continues to actively evolve, gaining your online reputation is not enough anymore. We need to maintain and improve it. We need to make sure that it is not only us or the digital marketing department staff of our company that would understand the importance of this online reputation for the business. In order to be able to make sure that case, these modern business approaches will help you doing that.
Use of Technology and Reputation Tools
Industry specific reputation tools have given businesses a larger capacity to approach this big war of customer satisfaction. The hotel industry is one of the beneficiaries of the most sophisticated and automated systems in the market that not only allow them to listen to conversations, monitor the trends and profile their customers; they also allow them to rate themselves against the competition. This is a very progressive way of benchmarking your service offering and you need to make a point of finding out which tools are available in your industry to measure your online reputation.
Collecting Business Intelligence
Advanced businesses are implementing varied metrics to collect and analyze data to understand the foundation and variances of their online reputation. This is specifically important and it particularly helps in implementing business models that anticipate customer reactions to service provision. For example: Do you know the spending habits of the customers who leave the best reviews for your business? Do customers leave more negative reviews during seasonal sales? What age groups of customers are happiest with your products? This can even help in customer profiling.
Implementing Strategic Corporate Practices
Google’s algorithm has gone far and beyond the obvious. Today, the search giant has found a way of rewarding offline excellence in business execution by encouraging customers to review your offline businesses in the online sphere. This simply means that Google is powering offline experiences and bringing them to the world through reviews and ratings. Customers can then search for service providers based on their local business ratings. If your potential customer is only searching for business with a quality rating of 5, will you be there? It is time to make the right decisions when it comes to marketing products.
Legal Recourse in Defamation Cases
While this is not the preferred path for reputation management or improvement, businesses should not shy away from protecting their image online. What can you do with an ex-employee or a disappointed associate who is determined to ruin your online image? Do you want your brand to be dragged into the court of public opinion? Sometimes, though expensive, a legal approach to protecting your reputation will be required.
While thinking about this modern approach and the associated cost implications, do not forget that good online reputation is as good as a sales pitch. The possibility of converting that online customer looking at your website right now depends on the trust you can inspire in them based on what others are saying about you. This is an important business decision that should rank up there with all other strategic plans in place.
The other aspect is to research and see how your competition is doing in the reputation index; if you are selling related products and you are amassing negative reviews then it is time to look into your operational practices and correct your mistakes. Talk to your customers and see where you are excelling or going wrong; good or bad feedback is an indicator for business improvement. How you use it is the question.
Sync Both Sides
Your business is your business, neither it is in the digital world, or in the non-digital world. You need to corporate both of them so it would sync together well. The services or products that your business gave to customers should be always in a good shape. It means you need to make all of your staff understood the importance of the business' product or service in every single procedures. And yes, if you keep that, I bet you will get the reputation, either in the non-digital or digital world.
Please expect the third part article about this online reputation topic, and we will share some other tips to help you with your online reputation. And if you have some suggestion or other tips, we will be very happy to see your comments below.
