When a customer speaks, other customers listen.
When it comes to making a choice, people are more likely to trust insight from others who have been through similar experiences rather than a business sharing experience about themselves.
In fact, 95% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase. Not just that, they take it seriously too as 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. That's why you cannot ignore the importance of customer reviews.
It's becoming hardler and harder to stand online, and having a robust online reputation plays a huge role in propelling your business and attracting new customers. But reputation is not something you can build overnight. It takes little time and effort. And customer reviews remain a baseline for a user-centric business economy.
So how can you as a brand build a better reputation online by leveraging customer reviews? This guide will look at the ten best methods to improve your brand reputation online with customer reviews.
Approach #1: Take Stance Of Where You Stand Now & Set Goals
Approach #2: Provide Multiple Avenues To Leave Reviews But Dominate Local Search Results
Approach #3: Ask Your Customers In Person For A Review
Approach #4: Ask The Right Questions
Approach #5: Share Customer Reviews On Social Media
Approach #6: Respond & Reply To All Reviews, Good or Bad
Approach #7: Provide Excellent Customer Service - This Is Where It All Begins
Approach #8: Explore Video Testimonials
Approach #9: Keep Track Of Your Online Reviews
Approach #10: Consistency Is The Key
Streamline Your Review Management Process With Statusbrew
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Approach #1: Take Stance Of Where You Stand Now & Set Goals
You might have some set of online customer reviews already. As you begin to craft a strategy that helps you to manage and improve online customer reviews, it's essential to start by taking stock of how you are currently rated online by your customers.
Take some time to dive deeper and understand how your brand is currently reviewed on Google, social media, or any other spot where customers are talking about your brand. See where you stand on each of these sites. Is there one website that is more frequented by your customers to share experiences about your brand?
Jot down your notes for each website, and quantify your average rating and number of reviews for each platform. Now that you have dissected and analyzed your current digital stance, it's time to establish goals for your customer reviews about your brand.
Do you want to increase the review count for ratings? Or is your goal to start replying to online customer reviews if your customers are already reviewing your brand frequently?
If you have a fair amount of reviews but low ratings, you need to dig into those reviews to understand why your customers submit low reviews. If you don't have a lot of reviews, you need to focus on increasing the number of reviews.
You need to be prescriptive with your goals to hone on clear actions.
Approach #2: Provide Multiple Avenues To Leave Reviews But Dominate Local Search Results
When asking for reviews from your customers, you should be flexible and suit their needs, rather than just your own. Hence, you should not just stick to one platform.
Instead, you should allow your reviews to be spread across different platforms, especially those that customers most visit. This will also provide a neutral space for potential customers who can learn about your business and services.
While you work on spreading out space for your customers to share reviews, Google is definitely one place where you want to have reviews because of its popularity and usage. Google customer reviews are excellent ways to boost your business and its services.
63.6 % of consumers say they are likely to check reviews on Google before visiting a business.
Google is potentially the first page where your customers will notice your brand, so an up-to-date list of positive reviews and thoughtful responses to negative reviews will be a powerful driver for your prospects.
Image Source: David's Kitchen Google
Hence create and claim your google my business profile and make your listing eligible to appear on searches, maps, and other Google services. Verify your ownership and take charge of your reviews to keep your online reputation healthy and attract new customers.
By abandoning your Google my business listing or not maintaining it regularly, you run the risk of missing out on an opportunity to indicate to your prospects that you are a lively and responsive brand online. If you want to draw traffic to your website, you need to start managing your Google my business listing actively. This maintains a steady flow of user-generated content to preserve your online reputation.
Allow customers to leave whatever reviews they want and never adopt practices that violate the policies of any reviewing platform. Like review gating on google business listing.
Learn more Outsmart Fake Negative Reviews On Google My Business
Another best place to gather and display customer reviews is your own website.
When it comes to collecting reviews, you can provide two kinds of reviewing platforms to your customers to share reviews.
- Niche review sites: You can focus on collecting online customer reviews from specialized sites according to your business types. For example, websites like Trivago, Oyster, and Trip advisor are famous for hotel services.
Image Source: Trivago
- Local search directories: These platforms are not limited to types of business as any and every business can use them for the purpose of customer reviews. Sites like Google Places, Yahoo Local, Yelp, Merchant Circle, and CitySearch are excellent options for local search directories.
You can share the good reviews you have received on these sites on your website’s testimonial pages.
Image Source: Duct Tape Marketing
Approach #3: Ask Your Customers In Person For A Review
No matter how happy your customers are with your service, the reality is very few will go out of their way to post a genuine review by themselves.
72% of consumers will leave a review for a business when asked.
Your customers would be happy to share their reviews, but only when you ask them because good things come by asking! Now you know why.
Once they are done with the purchase, ask your customers to leave a review for your product and services. Be brave! If you have already developed a connection with your customers, they will be more than willing to leave their feedback.
Show your customers an easy and painless path to write up a quick review, rather than making them hop through several URLs and web pages. Provide guidelines on how they can review your products and how it can be beneficial for them.
Asking for reviews will give your potential customers a balanced and accurate view of your brand and counter the undeniable effect of negative reviews (which unfortunately tend to pile up faster than positive reviews).
Ask for reviews, and you may receive one. But you won’t get any if you don’t ask in the proper manner. Avoid asking for reviews from customers in the first interaction itself after purchase. This will come off as a negative sign for customer service. It will be rendered as an ingenuine conversation, not caring about the customer experience and just about collecting reviews from customers.
Image Source: Dental Studio
Approach #4: Ask The Right Questions
The best way to increase and improve your reviews is to make the whole process easier and more straightforward for your customers. When you follow up with your customers asking for a review, use simple and specific questions to prompt in case they struggle to find their own words.
Ask them questions like “how did you find our delivery time?” or “what do you like the most about our product.” Ask them if they would be willing to shop again from your brand. This will help you hugely in improving the quality of positive reviews.
It will ensure that you have some valuable and well-worded feedback on your review page. When you make sharing the review process easier for our customers, it might work in favor of your customer service and help you win more brownie points.
Approach #5: Share Customer Reviews On Social Media
Your job does not end once you ask customers for their reviews; you need to incorporate your customer’s voices into your brand. Social media will help you do that brilliantly.
Actual consumer feedback is far more convincing to your prospective customers rather than a product description or persuasive sales copy. Social proof has influenced a lot many consumers to buy products and services online.
When you highlight customer reviews on social media, you increase transparency with your customers and boost trust (which is what drives conversion). You can create engaging image posts featuring customer reviews in the form of quotes.
Put out such social media posts with a heartfelt thank you. This will convince social followers that you don't just ask for customer reviews, but you read them and also care about them.
Image Source: Sellfy Instagram
This results in positive publicity as it gives social proof to potential customers who look up your brand’s social media page. Make reviewing fun for your customers by asking them to post selfies with your product and mentioning why they loved it!
You can also make an announcement when you solved a complaint that had come up in the form of a review. Since a lot of brands are only talking about positive reviews, posting about your negative reviews will catch people’s attention.
You can accompany such complaints with how you tackled them gracefully and how the customer was satisfied at the end. This will build trust and credibility as even your customers know no brand is perfect, and mistakes can happen knowingly or unknowingly. But what's important in front of your customers is you owning up to your responsibility as a trustable brand.
Enable reviews sharing on social media platform
Most brands make this huge mistake of disabling reviews on their social media pages. This impacts your customer’s perception hugely. If you have disabled review sharing, your customers will know that you have done so to hide the negative reviews.
Products with positive reviews sold 200% more than those with no ratings.
Hence ensure that all your social media platforms allow your customers to share reviews to avoid losing valuable feedback and positive reviews.
Approach #6: Respond & Reply To All Reviews, Good or Bad
89% of consumers read the business’s responses to reviews. Also, 44% of people
think that brand conversations are more persuasive than what a brand claims in their advertising materials. Such brand conversations include how a brand chooses to respond to online customer conversations.
It’s essential to make your customers feel that you enjoy their compliments and consider their complaints. So, respond to all reviews, be it negative or positive. Your customers took out their valuable time to review your services. Hence, a simple “thank you” will go a long way in nurturing long-term relationships with your present customers.
Image Source: Etsy Facebook
Managing your reputation online is time-bound, and so are managing reviews. Simply put, this means responding to online customer reviews as quickly as possible, be it good or bad, probably within first 24 hours.
According to Yelp, 33% of customers are likely to upgrade or change a negative review if the brand responds with a personalized message within a day. In this manner, your customers will come to know that their inputs are invaluable for your brand.
But responding to criticism is one of the most challenging aspects of customer service. Hence, focus on responding with a solution to negative reviews. Take this as an opportunity to grow. Remain calm and cool and outline a plan to fix this situation in a satisfying way for your customers.
In this manner, if a buyer ever comes across a negative review, they will also see that you have responded with a solution and apologized in a public forum. It will leave a positive impression on your buyer and make them feel that customer satisfaction is your top priority.
Image Source: JetBlue Facebook
Here’s how you should respond to a Poor Review in four easy steps
- Thank them for dropping a review
- Apologize for the bad experience they had
- Outline how you can work on correcting what’s broken
- Ask them to give you another chance
Statusbrew helps you to seamlessly manage and promptly reply to reviews on all your Google my business listings. You can involve your team members and make sure that you don't miss out on even a single review. By activating the snooze function, you can avoid missing out on reviews that require significant attention.
Approach #7: Provide Excellent Customer Service - This Is Where It All Begins
Be good to your customers in providing customer service, and they will be good to you online.
The key to any business staying on top of the game is to make customers feel happy and satisfied with exceeded expectations. Without this, you would never be able to ace online customer reviews.
The best way to encourage positive customer reviews is to ground your business in the fundamentals of good customer service. No amount of review strategy can save a business from an awful customer experience.
Understand that your staff who has been a point of touch for your brand with your customers would have diffused a situation that eventually leads unhappy customers to vent their frustration in the form of negative reviews.
Treat your customers exceptionally well, and they will be more likely to spread the word about your brand to potential customers.
Approach #8: Explore Video Testimonials
Most of the time, brands focus on asking text review requests from their customers. But text reviews are becoming antiquated now. You need to widen your idea of traditional reviews and star ratings.
Your customers don't want to type a review every time. You need to start getting creative in how your customers share their reviews.
2/3 of consumers say they’re more likely to purchase after watching a testimonial video demonstrating how a brand’s product or service helped someone.
Video content becomes more accessible for people to consume and helps them to process information faster. Video broadens the audience base and generates more shares. Also, customers feel that videos are harder to fake as compared to text reviews.
Thus, video testimonials are seen as more trustworthy and authentic. It is also a fantastic way of showing how your product works. It would appear as your existing customers saying, "Hey, I've used this before, and it's great. So, let me show you how to use it."
You can also collaborate with an influencer and send them a product and ask for a video review. These videos can be actively shared on social media and also used in sponsored ads.
Seeing someone on video triggers emotions much differently than just reading something. People would appreciate it when they can learn precisely how your brand or product made life easy for someone else.
At the same time, you don't want someone to watch your video testimonials and feel confused about watching them. Hence do not just ask random customers for video testimonials to appear as a marketing ploy. Instead, you should ask your loyal customers to create video testimonials for your brand.
Ask them in such a way that they enjoy creating and sharing a video testimonial about your brand. Also, do not make it extra long for customers to watch. Keep an optimal length that can be viewed easily.
Image Source: Vivial
Bonus Content: How To Spot A Fake Review? 5 Tips And Tricks
Approach #9: Keep Track Of Your Online Reviews
Now that you have collected a reasonable amount of online customer reviews, you need to get back to the very first step, which is why you started working on online customer reviews. You need to determine if you have been heading in the right direction and if your goals are being achieved from time to time.
Analyze all kinds of reviews, positive and negative, and find out the root cause behind the negative ones. Draw a practical and feasible plan to neutralize the negative reviews. You can create a brief summary of customer review data based on issue popularity and discuss it with your team.
This will make it much easier for you to take action on different issues highlighted in the reviews and channel them to suitable team members who can take action on the feedback.
Prioritization is one of the most powerful things you can do with online customer reviews. That is, you can create a list of the top 10 customer issues majorly pointed out by a bunch of your customers and ask your team to start working on those issues.
Approach #10: Consistency Is The Key
Your brand is working hard to provide excellent service and products to your customer. Your commitment will be paid in the form of online customer reviews.
Ensure you remain consistent in this approach as acquiring customer reviews is not a one time thing.
Prepare a solid process using which you can consistently collect online customer reviews. Keep a dedicated team in place to work on resolving the customer issues from those reviews. This will also ensure that your negative reviews are also decreasing in number simultaneously.
No brand is flawless, and hence no matter how hard you try, 1 out of 10 customers will have an unforeseen issue come up in the form of online customer reviews. However, that’s not the point of concern. The matter of concern is how you handle the review and whether you prioritize it and resolve customer issues at the earliest to improve the quality of the review.
Streamline Your Review Management Process With Statusbrew
It can be hard for your brand to keep a track of every customer review and comment across social.
Statusbrew unifies all your Google My Business reviews, Facebook reviews & all your comments across social in a single dashboard. You can manage communication as a team & automate certain actions. Also get detailed reports regarding your ratings & the change in them over a particular time period.
Want to discuss further? Book a free demo or start your free trial today!
Statusbrew is an all in one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and even Google My Business.
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