Guest Poster: Consumer Affairs for Brands
Customer service is all about responsiveness, and small businesses face a special challenge when monitoring and responding to customer reviews. Often each employee in a small company does several jobs at once, so they can feel overwhelmed by the time investment required to keep up with customer feedback. In a 2012 Vertical Response survey, one-third of small business owners said they’d like to spend less time on dealing with social media and nearly half of the survey respondents said that they currently spend over 6 hours per week on social media. However, reputation management is even more important for small businesses than it is for large ones, because with less overall feedback your brand can suffer from a single negative review. Here are five realistic tips for how your small business can improve customer service by paying attention to online feedback.
1. Monitor customer feedback on all channels
Google and other search engines crawl Twitter and Facebook as well as third-party review sites like ConsumerAffairs.com, Yelp, etc., so negative social media feedback often shows up on search results. Users searching for reviews on a business often search for business name together with terms like “scam” or “complaint” to see what comes up. The first step to taking control of your online reputation is to routinely monitor all customer responses across the web. ConsumerAffairs can help you convert negative customer experiences into positive ones to increase your star-rating.
2. Respond to negative comments
When asked about their buying decisions, 86 percent of customers surveyed by Dimensional Research stated that they were influenced by negative online reviews. Customers who have had a negative experience don’t expect a company to reach out to them proactively, so you’ll impress them with a personal email or even a phone call. A partnership with ConsumerAffairs enables quick and flexible response to unhappy commenters, and our partners have seen up to 35 percent of brand detractors transformed into satisfied brand promoters. Furthermore, we make real-time alerts available to our partners; these provide a grace period in which your brand can respond to a negative comment before the review is published, in order to quickly resolve the issue. In this way, negative feedback can be answered before it is published, and your brand’s reputation is not affected.
3. Shape your brand through showcasing positive comments
Word of mouth advertising doesn’t just happen face to face anymore; research by SearchEngineLand shows that 72 percent of customers place as much trust in online reviews as they do in personal recommendations. Partnering with ConsumerAffairs allows your business to take advantage of our SEO expertise, so that your potential customers will see great comments about your business front and center in their search results.
4. Put brand ambassadors in the spotlight
If your company takes time to nurture a relationship with happy customers who are active on social media, those customers can gradually do some of the work of shaping the public perception of your brand. These “brand ambassadors” are especially helpful when they share their good reviews with a network that’s local to your business. According to research by comScore Networks and TMP Directional Marketing, 69 percent of consumers are more inclined to use a local business if they can find information about it through their social media site.
5. Reduce “feedback friction” by partnering with a third-party review site
The term “feedback friction” refers to the extra steps that customers have to take in order to leave a review: they may have to search the review site to find a vendor’s listing on the site and then create a profile or login for their account in order to comment. It’s a marketing truism that disgruntled customers are far more motivated to deal with all these extra steps than satisfied customers are, and so as a result the ratio of negative to positive feedback is skewed. Partnering with ConsumerAffairs streamlines the channels through which your happy customers can share their experiences, so your online reputation will reflect the true value of your business. We collaborate with you to create simple feedback mechanisms, and we also collect comments and reviews across all channels so that your customers can easily comment on whichever platform they prefer.
In this age of unprecedented consumer power, effective responses to customer reviews is the backbone of good marketing. Contact ConsumerAffairs to learn more about how your small business can benefit from our partnership and accreditation program.
