How to Use Online Reputation Management to Streamline the Customer Experience
A Win-Win for Your Company and Your Customers
It’s 12:30 on a Saturday afternoon. The Thompsons have just driven three hours to the Mountain Magic family resort, famous for its treetop zip lines and enormous indoor waterpark. Despite their excitement, Mom and Dad are on edge.
The kids are hungry. The check-in line winds through the lobby and out the door. “The computers were down,” the other waiting guests grumble. As the resort staff struggles to catch up, Dad tells himself it won’t be long until he relaxes by the pool with a beer and a hamburger.
But, when he gets to the reception desk, he finds that there has been a mix-up. Instead of the deluxe cabin that the family reserved, the Thompsons will have to stay in a smaller suite in the main hotel.
Frustrated, Mom takes to the internet. “One star. Long wait to check in. Many computer issues at the front desk. We did not receive the room we reserved. Will not return.”
Now, Moms across the Northeast are researching family trips to Mountain Magic just as the Thompsons’ poor review is being published. For Mountain Magic, one family’s bad experience has the power to influence how hundreds (or even thousands) of other family’s DON’T spend their vacation dollars.
But what if there is a way to convert negative reviews like the Thompsons’ and other negative social mentions and survey responses into support tickets that solve customer issues before they escalate? Many times resolving the issue so well that the customer removes their negative comment and replaces it with a positive one?
Thankfully, there is. Online reputation management services have the ability to efficiently automate response tickets that direct specific company employees to respond to, address, and resolve customers’ negative comments.
How? We’ll get to that. First, let’s break down exactly why positive online reviews are crucial to businesses today.
The Numbers
Countless studies and surveys confirm what consumers have understood for years. Reviews matter. Here’s just one example. According to a survey by the online marketing firm brightlocal, 87% of customers consulted online reviews when researching a business in 2020.
Per that same study, star rating was considered the most important review factor by those who completed the survey, with only 48% saying that they would consider using a business with less than four stars.
The newest reviews carry the most importance to consumers, with 73% only paying attention to reviews posted in the last month. 72% had themselves written a review for a local business in the past year.
Most importantly, 94% of those surveyed reported that positive reviews make them more likely to use a business, while 92% said that negative reviews make them less likely to purchase from a business. REVIEWS MATTER.
Studies like this make clear that for today’s business, positive reviews are crucial to your brand. Favorable reviews lead to increased sales, good word of mouth, and a competitive edge. Successful companies include review management in their marketing plan. That’s where reputation management services come in.
The How
Now we will take a look at how businesses can employ online reputation management to respond to negative reviews. With the creation of automatic customer support tickets, companies can turn a customer’s poor experience around. Companies often prompt those same customers to write new, exceptionally positive reviews.
Here’s how. We’ll divide the process into three easy parts. Tickets, turn around, and technology.
1. Tickets
An automated inbox collects negative responses about your business from sites throughout the internet and gathers them into one inbox, where they are assigned a “ticket” and divided into categorized queues. This automated ticketing solution provides a way to manage, track and solve customer issues across the company. By tracking all actions in one place, your customer experience improves, and customer satisfaction rates increase.
Each ticket is assigned a queue, like “General,” “Manager,” “Sales,” and “Escalations.” These queues are then assigned to a specific employee to address, one who is specially trained in resolving those types of customer support issues. The automated system will also remind employees to follow up as necessary.
For Mom Thompson, her review generated an automated ticket by the online reputation management service. That ticket was assigned to customer support employee Robert Z. Mr. Z. replied to Mom on behalf of Mountain Magic, requesting that she reach out to him directly. He then offered her two complimentary nights at the resort in the room of her choice, as well as free meal vouchers for the family.
Mom Thompson was so pleased with Mountain Magic’s efforts to fix the situation that she removed her negative review and posted multiple positive ones on several sites, each detailing her new favorable experience with the resort.
By solving customer issues quickly and thoroughly like this, an automated ticketing system can make a key difference in the ratings, reviews, and recommendations that your customers make, as well as whether they return to your business.
2. Turn-Around. (Resolve the issue)
Let’s look into more detail about the process of resolving a ticket. Overall, customers are less upset that there has been an issue than with your business’s response to the issue. That’s why responding to and resolving the issue is critical. The proper process delivers what customers and companies need. And what we need is exceptional customer service.
As mentioned above, tickets are created and assigned automatically. This is done with software designed specifically for reputation service management. This software is created to respond to rules like “For each one-star review, create a ticket and send to General Queue,” and “Send ticket to Escalation if not closed within one day.”
Each queue is then assigned to a targeted employee to resolve. This ensures that there is no confusion over who is in charge of what. Notifications are sent to the corresponding employees when tickets are added to their queue. And if that employee is away from their desk, a mobile app makes responding to the tickets easy. These employees also get notifications every time a ticket’s status changes.
Closing the ticket is the final step. When an issue is resolved in a satisfactory manner to both customer and business, the ticket can be closed. In the case of Mom Thompson, she updated her former one-star review to four stars to reflect her now positive feelings towards the Mountain Magic resort.
3. Technology
The cutting-edge software behind this kind of reputation management service allowed the Thompson family to turn their Mountain Magic experience around. This sort of tool is invaluable in the modern business world. Comments, ratings, and reviews are created not just by professional journalists today but by everyone in our time of Facebook, Google, and Yelp.
The creation of tickets to enable rapid response to these comments, ratings, and reviews streamlines customer service for businesses, creating a better overall customer experience.
An automated workflow ensures that no bad experience slips through the cracks. And that your business enforces and exceeds your service-level agreements.
Welcome to the Age of Reputation Management
In today’s business world, customer reviews hold the power to make or break a business, whether it’s a small mom-and-pop or a global corporation. We are in the age of reputation management. Without it, your business risks stagnancy, slow growth, and even failure. The correct reputation management strategies, including the review management support tickets we explored, ensure that all your marketing tools work together—all at the speed of our digital world.
Modern consumers are equipped with the tools they need, from smartphones to desktop computers, to research a business quickly.
After all, it’s important to them which companies they spend their family’s hard-earned dollars on. A simple google search yields today’s consumers’ hundreds upon thousands of customer reviews to consider. If negative reviews are the most recent, or if the number of negative reviews tips too far for comfort, your company loses that customer.
But with the right reputation management, you can turn your current customer’s reviews into your competitive edge.
Easy. Fast. Effective.
With customer support tickets, online reputation management is easy, fast, and effective. Businesses can view their reviews from multiple sites like Facebook, Yelp, and Angie’s List, on just one interactive dashboard.
Reviews are filtered by ratings, time period, and source to help you identify the areas and sites which need your attention. New review alerts are sent to you via email or SMS, ensuring you are on top of every possible bit of negative feedback and can address them quickly.
Poor reviews are swiftly converted into support tickets, which are assigned to specially trained employees to resolve. By keeping customers engaged and acknowledging issues right away, your business is viewed as honorable and trustworthy. Customers can see and feel that their satisfaction is of the utmost importance to your business.
Results
With the help of these support tickets, negative customer experiences are turned around. The positive and VERY positive reviews for your company on public review sites grow to huge numbers. The negative reviews fall to few or none. On your own company website, you are able to display a large collection of new and continuously updated exceptionally positive reviews.
In as little as one month, customer support tickets transform customer experience and boost customer retention using online review management.
Online reputation management that boosts customer experience in this way is a win-win for customers and the company. The customer is pleased with their experience with your company, and your company retains a customer. Sales increase as positive reviews multiply, and your brand’s favorable online reputation shines through.
Keeping up with the Joneses
Remember the Jones family? At the end of the summer, Mom and Dad Jones made sure to take advantage of their two free nights at Mountain Magic. Mom, Dad, Grandma, and kids all enjoyed deluxe accommodations in a gorgeous on-site luxury cabin. With meals paid for with the complimentary vouchers, the Thompson family had cash freed up to spend on extras, like an adventure ropes course and exploring the nearby town.
Without Mountain Magic’s automatic ticketing system to monitor online reviews, it’s likely that the Thompson’s would have kept the bad taste left in their mouth towards the resort. And that their negative review would have directly influenced other families NOT to choose Mountain Magic for their getaway.
Instead, the Jones made new and wonderful family memories at the mountain resort, and their subsequent post on a popular internet review site captured the attention of hundreds of potential Mountain Magic guests.
“Four stars. We could not be happier with how Mountain Magic handled our reservation mix-up last Spring. Their gracious customer support staff reached out to us online and swiftly resolved the issue. We loved every minute of our recent two-night stay at MM. We can’t wait to come back next year! Kudos to Mountain Magic for putting their customers first!”