“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” – Benjamin Franklin
In a world where your reputation matters more than ever, taking control of your brand identity is crucial. Learn why your rep is so important and how to create one that’s authentic and trustworthy.
Building Trust
- Trust is the basis of any ongoing relationship. If your customers trust you, they’ll come back again and again.
- To build trust, you must be honest about your services, offerings, and shortcomings.
- When you make mistakes, own up to them and make them right as soon as you can.
- By delivering consistent products and services, your customers will learn to count on you.
Steps to Build a Reputation
- Create content. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional methods.
- Engage with Tweets, comments and private messages. 71% of consumers who have a positive experience on social media will recommend the brand to friends.
- Encourage reviews. 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they do personal recommendations.
- Monitor your reputation. 86% of people are hesitant to do business with a company that has bad reviews.
How Reviews Impact a Business
- Reviews can produce an average of an 18% uplift in sales.
- 68% of people form opinions after reading between one and six reviews online.
- One negative review costs a business an average of 30 customers.
Avoiding Bad Reviews
Get proactive
- Make your complaint form easy to find on your website, and encourage anyone with problems to speak with you directly.
- Collect feedback constantly.
- Surveys, focus groups and even quick chats one-on-one with customers can help you take the temperature of your clientele.
- Find your brand evangelists and build relationships with them.
- It’s helpful to have voices from the community to help defend fortify your online reputation.
Create a crisis plan for when a bad review comes in:
- Respond quickly
- Stay diplomatic
- Work to solve problems away from the public eye
Strategies to Promote Positive Customer Feedback
Ask
- Most people only think about writing reviews when something has gone wrong.
- Ask satisfied customers to help you out by leaving a review.
Create opportunities
- People don’t want to waste time looking for a spot to leave a review. Maintain your presence on Yelp, Google, Facebook and other review sites to make it easy for customers to leave nice comments on their preferred platform.
- There are lots of websites out there dedicated to reviews. Make sure you establish your presence on the ones that make sense for your company to drive even more web traffic.
Offer incentives
- While bribing customers for good reviews is a bad idea, offering incentives in exchange for any reviews at all can warrant more positive feedback than negative.
- Coupons, loyalty points and raffles can be offered up to those who leave reviews. Extra points should be rewarded to those who share their review on social media.
Prioritize customer service
When it comes to attracting great reviews, nothing is more effective than offering stellar customer service every time you interact with customers.
- Dedicating your company to providing excellent customer experiences will ensure a positive reputation.
- Partner with a virtual receptionist or call center team to help guarantee excellent customer support every time your phone rings.
More infographics you might be interested in:
The Truth Behind Multitasking: Productivity’s #1 Killer
Deciding Between an In-House and a Virtual Receptionist for Your Business
We’ll Work on Your Business – Your Caller’s Experience with MAP
