According to Wikipedia, “Online Reputation Management“ is the practice of monitoring the Internet reputation of a person, brand or business, with the goal of emphasizing positive coverage rather than negative reviews or feedback. Doing reputation management for individuals is often referred to as online identity management (OIM), online image management, online personal branding or personal reputation management (PRM).
At Webutable.com, we do not think this definition adequately describes the breadth of the discipline, nor does it emphasize the criticality of the issue for local businesses. We have developed a comprehensive suite of services to manage your online reputation both pro-actively and reactively.
We can monitor specific websites such as Yelp or Tripadvisor, for example, to watch for any activity about your business. If a customer leaves you a review on any site we are monitoring, we can notify you immediately. You will know about it and be able to respond to it before prospective customers do.
We can also actively manage these same profiles for you, responding to customer feedback on your behalf. Whether it be good or bad feedback, a response to it is usually encouraged. This makes you appear engaged and collaborative. Nobody expects a business to have 100% perfectly happy customers, but consumers do want to see how business respond to criticism.
If you don’t already have a process for collecting customer feedback, you should. We can help develop the process and system to help you collect feedback directly from your customers quickly after the point of purchase. This will give you a real insight into what you are doing right, and what you are doing wrong. It also gives the customer a chance to “vent” privately versus publicly on highly visible online review sites. Our systems can turn that negative experience into a positive one offline, so your online reputation remains highly positive.
If you have done a good job in collecting real feedback from real customers, we can also help you get this information in front of potential customers. We can run an exhaustive analysis on your current online reputation presence, and summarize our results in an Executive Dashboard type of report. This analysis is often the primary resource we use to form a strategy on how to address your online reputation management needs!
Contact us today to get more information. If you have an Online Reputation Management project, please contact us or, to express the process, please fill out our Project Questionnaire.
Online Reputation Repair Services
No matter how customer-focused your business is or how in-tune you are to your customers you cannot please everyone. Whether it is an unhappy customer or a scorned former employee, just one disgruntled person can have a huge financial impact on your business by logging onto the internet and trashing your business.
If you are lucky, these angry people will just go to one or two sites and tell everyone there how bad your customer service is and that no one should ever use your services again. These one or two sites alone can have an impact on your business. If the person is REALLY ticked off, they can go to multiple review sites online and leave scathing, negative reviews. One disgruntled customer alone can cost a business hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue just by writing bad reviews online.
This is where our Reputation Repair service comes into play. We will do a comprehensive analysis of your Webutable across all sites and determine the exact extent of damage that has occurred. Once we present you with our findings we will put together a detailed plan to repair your online reputation. We have come up with a systematic approach that allows us to quickly evaluate the damage and repair your reputation as quickly as possible. Our system is based on the three R’s: Remove, Respond and Replace.
Remove: With our comprehensive view of your business in hand, we will go through each site’s terms of service and evaluate all bad reviews to see if these reviews are in violation of each site’s terms of service. If the answer is yes we will contact any given site and ask that the comment is removed. While this sounds simple it often takes multiple contacts with sites and can even require legal action to get slanderous or otherwise inappropriate comments removed. However, once removed your problems are usually solved.
Respond: If we feel we do not have recourse to have these comments removed we will move on to help you draft a plan to Respond to these comments. We believe that the issue should first be taken up directly with the poster of the bad reviews and that businesses should make every attempt at rectifying the issue directly with the consumer before any further action is taken. Many times customers can be pacified by acknowledging the problem and doing whatever necessary to make things right in their eyes.
Once you have done this and the customer feels better about your business many times simply asking them to edit or remove their comment will resolve the problem. If this is not successful we will walk through all of the options with you and your public relations department to ensure an effective response to the comments left. Your response should address the issue at hand and communicate to your potential customers viewing it that you value their business and are willing to do what is needed to ensure a positive experience for all customers.
Replace: If we are not able to have comments removed and you feel that your response did not give you the solution you wanted we will begin on our third strategy of replacing the harmful content with positive content. We will work closely with you to create a short-term plan to collect and syndicate positive comments from your customer base. We will work quickly to limit the damage by pushing harmful content out of sight and off of the first page of review sites.
With your reputation repaired you will be able to sleep easier knowing that when your potential customers do find your business online you will have a fighting chance to convert them to new customers. No longer will the first interaction with these prospects be negative and scare them away before they even attempt to contact you or set foot in your store. Let your customers come to their own conclusions about your business instead of losing them before you ever get a chance to make them happy, repeat customers.
Customer Feedback Management Services
Customer feedback is one of the most valuable and yet underused tools a business has. What better way to find your flaws and improve on them than to ask your customers what they think about you? While you are busy running your business we will develop a plan to solicit feedback from your customers. The more aggregate data we can collect, organize and analyze the more information we can provide you and your business.
We have developed many standardized ways to collect feedback from your customers as well as some very engaging out-of-the-box ideas. With your business and how you interact with your customers in mind, we will put a plan in place to collect as much feedback as possible.
Once we have gathered this feedback we will organize it in a way that makes it easy for you to review and analyze. Based on your needs we can either provide this data directly to you or take this data and analyze it and provide you with a summary of what your customers are saying about your business. We will let you know the most common complaints and help you develop a plan to improve upon these areas that your customers feel are your weaknesses.
Think about the following scenario…
An individual is eating at your restaurant and there is a vent blowing ice-cold air on them, to the point that it is uncomfortable. The customer mentions this to the server, who seems to dismiss the feedback and nothing is done. This scenario probably would not escalate to the restaurant manager, but the customer could very well whip out their iPad and leave a scathing review online, costing you business as other people read this review and choose to go somewhere else.
Compare that with this possibility…
Same customer, same cold air. But in this scenario, he sees a card on the table that has a QR code or link to a real-time survey about their customer experience. They scan the code, and quickly provide a rating of 3 with feedback that the table is uncomfortably cold. As soon the customer submits, an alert is sent to the restaurant manager on duty, who can then go to the table and greet the customer.
Most likely, the situation could be fixed on the spot, or at least a promise to have it fixed, and perhaps the manager was to offer a cercy such as a discount off their bill, or a complimentary desert (just not ice cream.) This customer who wanted to be heard has been not only satisfied, but extraordinarily so. They then go out and leave a positive review about your business. And last but not least, you have successfully captured a new customer’s email address that can be used for future marketing purposes.
Review Management Services
Our Online Review Management Services help you get better control of your business. We can help you implement a service to collect feedback from your customer at the point of purchase. This has 2 very important advantages.
First, you can respond to any negative customer experiences immediately, reducing the likelihood that the unsatisfied customer will go online and leave a negative review about your business.
The second advantage is that you will have created a valuable asset by collecting real reviews from real customers that can be used to populate review sites, not to mention build a massive email database of your customers.
We have developed proprietary methods for taking real customer feedback from real customers and using that to populate online review sites such as Yelp, CitySearch, kudzu, even OpenTable. This process maintains integrity by having gained the customer’s agreement that their feedback can be used as collateral, and by maintaining an auditable trail for the review; from the origination to where it’s ultimately published.
In addition to posting reviews on your behalf, we also have tools to help you monitor and measure the impact of these online reviews.