How to manage your customer review program?
On today’s competitive online marketplace, customer review is your most powerful weapon to make your company stand out. Reviews have become key elements of a strong online marketing strategy. Just having them isn’t enough, you need to manage them very properly which can be very time-consuming.
These tools will help you grow, streamline, automate and manage your customer reviews program.
Location-Based Apps
This is one of the best ways to get your business noticed and get positive feedbacks. Set your business with location-based features such as Yelp, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, Facebook, or Google Local. This will encourage your customers to check-in when they are nearby.
In this way, people can easily view, submit and share reviews on these sites or via the apps making the process very easy and accessible for both of you and customers. To make people aware of your presence on any sites use window stickers, pop up materials and site logos to direct them to read or submit reviews.
3rd Party Review Services
There are many service providers such as WoMo, eKomi, and Trustpilot that automatically follow up with your customers to secure review and then store them in a central place on your profile. Most of the time, you cannot edit, or change submitted reviews, although most will give you the option to approve them before they are published. Censoring review might not be a good idea and can make your profile look fake.
Though they often come with a price that may not be economically feasible for smaller business. You may also sometime miss the effectiveness of your business that you could have by reaching out directly to customers.
Brand Mention Tools
Customer review about your business are not just always a formal one. They might be reviewing on a different platform or any other social site. They might comment or mention your business anywhere in the online world and spread positive or negative opinion on any number of an online profile.
Hence, you need to hear what people are saying about your business by setting up a strong reputation monitoring system. There are many companies that offer this service and there are some free effective tools that work well for small business.
In that case, Google Alerts come very handily.You can choose to receive emails every time the search giants find a mention of a specific word or phrase including your brand or products name. You can also use SocialMention to see a comprehensive report of all mentions across 80 social platforms.
If your company is too large and value your staff time extremely, then it might be worth considering paid options such as Mention or ReviewTrackers which offers advanced reporting and functionality to let you manage your valuable customer feedbacks.
Customer Review Aggregate Services
I assume that you are on this page because you are unknown of Get5Stars service. This service offers a system that can automatically follow up with your customers to seek reviews with a powerful search feature that pulls in all the reviews for your business from other platforms such as Facebook, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google. You can easily get reports to let you see how your business is performing. Use their widget on your site. This widget will easily show your average ratings along with selected comments.
Now that you are well equipped for your problem there is one more thing you should know. Make sure there is someone always on your team who is responsible for managing your customer review program. Monitoring on customer review should be an integral part of your daily business to make sure that unhappy customers are contracted to address their complaints and glowing testimonials are showcased.