The significance of using a review management platform has risen now more than ever. Approximately 79% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Regardless of your industry, good reviews are essential!
Positive reviews give you key advantages that play a significant role in your branding.
Why are customer reviews important for your business?
They help increase brand visibility
A vast majority of shoppers search on Google, Bing, Facebook etc. before making their decisions on whether or not to buy things from websites.
Search engines always favour positive content over others, this happens only when your brand is generating tons of good reviews. Reviews help you boost local search engine rankings, thus creating more credibility and visibility for your business.
Social proof drives sales
People are more likely to make a purchase if other people, even total strangers, have already made the same purchase. Online reviews are the most significant source of social proof for today’s market, they have a visible impact on sales.
It is vital to show potential customers how satisfied other customers are with your business through past reviews and testimonials, it shows your brand is legitimate and trustworthy.
It builds trust and loyalty with customers
One recent study showed that a steady stream of positive reviews is one of the more critical factors in building your brand’s online credibility. Your customers’ reviews can build significant trust and loyalty for your brand.
If a negative review appears on your Facebook, Twitter, or an industry-specific site, never ignore or delete it. Try responding to that review, this will show that you care about your customers and take suitable actions to deliver a better experience.
Reviews are increasingly important for decision making
If you’re hoping to promote your business on social media, it’s important to get customers to talk about your brand. It is essential to check sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor or other industry-specific review sites to monitor customer sentiment towards your brand and reply to reviews.
Nearly two-thirds of customers think that online reviews are an essential part of their decision-making process while purchasing a product.
Gain better insights into what your customers want
Customer reviews are the best source of feedback for product development and better business growth. By analyzing your customers’ reviews, you can discover new expectations and understand what you are doing right.
Customers’ expectations are constantly changing, reviews are a great way to keep track of them.
5 Reasons why you need a review management platform
1. Save time and increase productivity
Time is always of the essence, especially for businesses. Agents cannot afford to waste time jumping from one channel or review site to another to respond to customers.
An omnichannel review management software integrates all your customer reviews across channels onto a single, smart inbox. This software allows your agents to collect reviews, answer them and send surveys to get feedback all on the same platform. An intelligent inbox helps increase productivity and speed of responses considerably higher.
A review management platform like Simplify360 ensures to streamline your review management process by enabling AI-based sentiment tagging and automated routing of reviews.
2. It helps streamline workflows
Set up automated routing based on role, sentiment, priority, issue type, and much more to remove all the grunt work from review management.
A review management software guarantees smooth and streamlined workflow to boost productivity.
Agents can focus on responding to customers’ reviews rather than wasting time on tedious backend work. With customizable and flexible review management platforms, you can create automated and SLA-based review routing as well.
3. Gather and analyze actionable insights
With an omnichannel review management platform, you can collect comprehensive insights across channels and break it down to be as specific or generic as needed. Customize reports to help you tackle specific issues.
Break down location reviews by role, location, region, and much more to get a thorough understanding of how your customers feel about your business and their satisfaction.
An omnichannel review management software will help you understand which channel or review sites your customers frequently use to interact with your business. If your customers tend to use Google Business Reviews the most, you can prioritize that source and enable automated responses to reviews.
4. Automate responses and boost productivity
Not all review sites allow businesses to respond to reviews, but the rest can be automated. How you choose to respond to a review depends on the sentiment and topic of the review, but most reviews are generic to which responses can be automated.
For reviews that are more negative and have a complaint, you can choose to automate a response by deflecting them to a private channel to solve the problem.
Simplify360 believes in a smooth man-machine collaboration for optimal results, you can automate the first response to a review and have an agent to fall back on if human intervention is required.
5. You can go the extra mile with surveys
To fully optimize your review management to its full potential by integrating survey management. Reviews are incredibly insightful and helpful, but surveys can help you take it to the next level.
With surveys, you can target specific customers, products or even target customers during a particular time in their customer journey.
Reviews highlight customers’ opinions, but surveys can help you get to the root cause and understand the best way to go about improving your customer experience. There are a variety of surveys, there are several to help you understand customer satisfaction.
Each survey helps you understand different aspects of your customers’ experiences. You can customize surveys to fit exactly what you’re aiming to understand.
How do you find the review management platform that best fits your business?
1. Read reviews on Review Aggregator Websites
Online client reviews can be a good source of information when deciding on what review management software to invest in. Reviews from websites such as TrustRadius and Gartner Peer Insights provide an overview from real customers.
Sites like these break down the reviews by key features like “ease of use”, “value for money” and “product capability” along with a detailed list of pros and cons, so you can evaluate which review management software fits your particular needs the best.
2. Compare the features the platforms offer
Once you have read the reviews from the company’s clients, you can move on to looking for specific features you need. Every organization offers different features and several variations within those features. However, there are some basic features you should consider looking for that most review management platforms provide.
Centralized Inbox
You can monitor and track all your reviews from a single place, most review management platforms offer a unified inbox. But not all provide intelligent inboxes, Simplify360’s review management software empowers businesses with automated tagging, routing, sentiment analysis and suggested responses.
Customizable Dashboards
This is a key feature, you can organize dashboards according to your requirements, whether it be role-based, location-based or more, you can decide what essential information you need and how.
Feedback and Data collection
It is important to collect your customers’ feedback and reviews, as they can be used for product development and more. Not all review management platforms allow businesses to gather customer feedback.
Analytics and Insights
You can’t grow when you don’t know where you stand amongst competitors. The information you get from analytics allows you to improve aspects of your business that directly impact growth.
Omnichannel and Automated
It is often challenging to manage feedback across many online channels like Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, Yelp. The leading review management platforms will help you collect and analyze feedback from as many sources as possible and organize it all in a single place. From there, you can conveniently automate responses to reviews or route them to the right teams.
Conclusion
As you compare review management software, look for evidence to support its claims. If the case studies support their claims and are compelling, you may have found the right match for you.
Reviews are helpful for both your customers and your business.
But what you do with the reviews truly impacts the extent to which your reviews are helpful.
Reviews are at the heart of customer-centric businesses because they can be a gold mine for insights. A review management platform can help you optimize your reviews to impact your business growth positively.