Importance of Customer Review Management

Customer review management is the practice of acquiring, monitoring and responding to reviews your business receives online. It also refers to the software or services your company may enlist to carry out these actions. The goal of customer review management is essentially reputation management. You want to know what people are saying about you and use those insights to inform your brand strategy. Like anything you do for your business, the endgame is to convert site visitors to loyal customers who will recommend you to their friends.

As a business owner, you need to be the expert on you. Just as conversations have moved online, so has word-of-mouth advertising. In fact, consumers are 71% more likely to make a purchase if they see it recommended on social media. Likewise, it’s become a trend to put companies on blast over things like late fulfillment, poor service and unsatisfactory product. People searching for your product will see other people’s take on it before they even see your ad copy. That’s why it’s imperative to monitor the conversation around your product. This is easier if you have a centralized dashboard for reading these reviews and ratings. If you don’t have review management software, you don’t really know what consumers are saying about you.

For you to truly measure your impacts you need a lay of the land. Birdeye’s benchmarking tool uses a natural language processor to tell you how you stack up to the competition. If your product is custom T-shirts, for example, you can look up how often terms like soft, comfy and perfect fit (or their antonyms) show up in your competitors’ reviews.

Most people’s online shopping starts in the search bar. It follows that if you’re not showing up on the first page of results, you may as well not exist. Customer review management helps your bottom line by increasing your visibility in search engines. By offering reviews through Google, Yelp and Facebook, your visibility gets folded into the existing popularity of those platforms (otherwise known as your local SEO). Doing so will drive up your ranking in the SERP (search engine results page).

There are two general approaches to reputation management: reactive and proactive. A reactive approach is when you combat negative or even defamatory statements about your company. A proactive approach is when you put out positive content about your brand so it populates most of your search results. For many merchants their reputation management will be a mix of the two.

Customer reviews are a unique opportunity to make a positive impression. This is especially important for e-commerce, where your customer funnel lacks the human component of an in-store purchase. Set time aside to respond to non-urgent reviews to keep contact up with customers. Above all, customers want to feel heard. By responding in a timely fashion with a genuine message, you’re providing your customer an experience they’ll remember. That’s why responding to positive reviews as well as negative will make you a stand-out. 

With any amount of success, some negative feedback is inevitable. Your first instinct might be to ignore it and hope it goes away - or conversely to go on the attack. Respond quickly and definitively, but politely. While some criticism is legitimate, you might find yourself the victim of spam or a hate campaign. In such cases, you might need to systematically remove reviews that are fraudulent or defamatory. 

This is actually a chance to promote your brand’s singular voice. Think of this way: someone who found you through the Shopping tab isn’t seeing the snappy, engaging copy on your beautiful website. However, they’re getting to see your brand voice in action when they see your measured but clever responses.

You have lots of balls in the air. You need to automate aspects of your customer relations management, which you can do through review managers. You can do a cursory search of your name, follow similar pages and read industry news over your morning coffee, but your overall idea of the landscape will be patchwork. As a partial observer, you’ll naturally pick and choose certain information when deciding how to move forward with your brand strategy. Otherwise, you’re bleeding money.

With a world of product information available, today’s customer is more discerning than ever. Put the power of search engines and social influence behind your business with customer review management