Responding to Digital Consumer Reviews
With the prevalence and popularity of online reviews, customer service can make or break a company. If a business is working hard to provide the best possible service to its customers, the opportunity to respond to both positive and negative reviews online is what can help companies become more visible in their markets. There are hundreds of tools that companies can use to track and respond to reviews from customers. Companies should take full advantage of those tools because every response they make will be seen by other customers outside of the one that a business is responding to.
Monitoring Reviews
Although there are the occasional internet trolls that decide to share a false negative review of a business on social media, most of the time, people who write business reviews do so because they truly want to express their feelings toward a business -whether positive or negative. Companies should be keeping up with all the reviews that consumers leave online. For positive reviews, it’s important that companies take the time to understand what elements of the business are appreciated by customers, and to share those positive notes and successes with employees. Positive reviews are a great opportunity for companies to celebrate their success, maintain a high-quality customer and employee experience, as well as build team morale.
When it comes to negative customer reviews, companies need to take the time to figure out which action can best remedy the complaints that a customer had in their review. That can mean listening to more feedback and taking action to avoid making the same mistake, speaking with the employees that made the mistake or having a company-wide discussion about the errors. Those strategies can help companies regain their customers’. It’s also important that businesses respond to all of their online reviews.
Responding to Reviews
Companies should respond to all the reviews they receive quickly, and to do that effectively, they can create a list of potential responses to the reviews they receive. It’s best to keep all the responses to reviews short and succinct. If the conversation needs to continue, it should be done on a different platform, such as email. It doesn’t matter if the review was positive or negative. Since everything on the internet is going to be available for a long time, it’s best to keep long responses private and to show consumers that they’ve been heard by the company. Lastly, it’s perfectly fine to promote specials or deals when responding to customer reviews. For example, for positive reviews, companies can recommend an upcoming discount or promotion to ensure that customers will come back in the future. This type of incentive from a business helps it build customer loyalty within its target audience.
