Reviews and Reputation Management Software 2021: Complete Guide

A good reputation is critical for businesses and helpful in gaining the trust of current and future customers. The aim of managing online reputation o.r reputation management is to shape and influence the public perception of a company, individual, or services. It is all about collecting information on, influencing, growing, and managing a company’s reputation or what is being said about a business enterprise, an individual, or about a group online.

According to statistics provided by a leading portal on an online reputation blog, reviews can literally make or break a customer’s trust in a customer, product, or brand. The blog cites that a whopping 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, while 60 % of consumers said that negative reviews made them not want to use a business or product.

As per a report titled ‘Online reputation management Market 2020: Prosperous Growth, Recent Trends, and Demand by Top Key Vendors like Grade Us, Reputation, HootSuite Media, Sprout Social’, the global online reputation management market is set to grow by a CAGR of 15% between 2020 and 2027.

A good reputation can be great for business and it ultimately translates into more revenue for the business. This is now backed by studies as well. According to a Harvard Business Review study, even a 1-star increase in rating can go a long way and result in a 5-9% increase in revenues.

Customer review sites are playing a major role in the purchasing decision-making process not only in B2C but also in B2B products and services. Reviews can be collected by the company directly or third party review sites. The reviews can be public or private in nature. Reviews contribute to the online reputation of the product and hence it becomes critical for businesses to monitor and analyze their product reviews.

What are Reviews and Reputation Management Software?

Review software keeps track of user’s online reviews about either companies, brands, products, or services online. It is useful in generating positive customer feedback and perception via review platforms which can in turn boost a company’s online reputation.

Using Reputation Management software, organizations can stay on top of their digital reputation using monitoring tools that scan social media discussions and posts, track online searches, and positive or negative reviews.

Reviews and Reputation Management software is used by companies to promote, influence, monitor and manage online review platforms and promote positive reviews of their brand or reputation online. It aids them in managing the search website results of their products and services.

Handle Negative Reviews

All businesses attract some negativity and one of the major benefits of using a Reputation Management Software is that it helps tackle negative reviews. By keeping tabs on the negative reviews, a company focuses on actively managing the damage a bad review has caused and better their online reputation. This can be handled by responding to negative reviews proactively or focussing on driving up more positive responses online.

Retain Customers

By monitoring customer feedback and review, companies can acknowledge and address an issue without letting it escalate. This also gives space for the company to put out clarifying information or combat misinformation and weed out outdated information. By addressing complaints in a professional manner, brands can foster loyalty from and build a strong customer base and strengthen customer retention.

Build Trust

By having both negative and positive reviews and by managing them in a time-bound and professional manner, brands can communicate their intention of sincerity and efforts of earning the trust of the customer. By responding to every valid inquiry made by a customer in a personable and friendly manner, the brand can validate a customer’s experience thereby ensuring that he or she feels heard, which ultimately makes them trust the brand more.

Improve Marketing Effectiveness

A good reputation makes marketing easier for the company as it ensures that your company’s trust factor is optimal. A good online reputation lays the groundwork necessary for a brand to reap rich benefits out of harnessing this trust that customers associate with the brand and gain future customers and seek newer markets. Positive Customer reviews can be used as customer testimonials and this eases marketing efforts.

Grow Revenue

As using a Reviews and Reputation Management Software helps keep the company abreast of negative reviews, social media discussions and manage it in an effective manner, it ends up attracting more business and consumers to the business and gives it a higher chance of a conversion. A better reputation means more sales which in turn higher bring in more profit.

Gain Better Business Insights

With good Reviews and Reputation Management Software in place, companies can gain valuable insights on how to increase brand awareness. Reviews by customers, when collated, can offer businesses more understanding of the right keywords, search results, and feature expectations. Moreover, the software also helps chart customer feedback through analytics that can be used to come up with better business strategies.

Which industries use Reviews and Reputation Management Software?

With the internet and social media changing the way businesses function, companies with a large online presence and active customer audiences need to be able to engage and guide online discussions in the right way. B2C industries have been ahead in this aspect as getting connected to consumers via social media and online channels have been a key strategy for B2C. But increasingly B2B companies also are focusing on getting their online reputation managed well.

The leading sectors that use these include healthcare, real estate, retail, legal, travel, automotive, IT and hospitality industry. Review software is more specific to the E-Commerce industry.

Managing Vast Online Impressions

Visibility on the web is crucial for business today. Online Reputation Management Software scours the web for comments, user reaction, and discussions to get better visibility via search pages through content creation, keyword optimization, and SEO auditing measures. This ensures that the brand gets a better position in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP).

Minimize Impact of Negative Publicity

Negative publicity or slander can temporarily damage a business and its impact can be kept to a minimal with the help of an Online Reputation Management Software. With timely and swift monitoring, responsive and firm action, companies can lessen the impact of negative publicity and save their online reputation by deploying smart online communication.

Accurate Business Listings

Review and Reputation Management Software ensures that there are accurate and consistent business listings and information about the brand available online. This helps push the brand information to scores of business directories, search engines, news aggregators, and GPS systems that host such content. Such a platform gives brands better visibility and helps pull potential customers and ultimately reach new markets.

Provide Business Intelligence

As the software has tools to listen to both positive and negative mentions of a brand online, it alerts the company that it can then set about strategizing and using corrective measures to reclaim its reputation. By monitoring new listings, reviews, and feedback, the company can gather vital business intelligence to make quick decisions to alter and tweak its course to get more profitable outcomes.

Response Management

Online Reputation Management Software helps companies access and respond to reviews written by customers directly from the vantage of a single dashboard and acknowledge issues right away. For a large business with a huge base of customers, this is a huge capability to be able to communicate with customers in a prompt manner, thereby ensuring that the customer experience is enriching and they come back a second time.

A Review Software helps teams create reusable and customizable review response templates suitably tailored for often asked questions and thereby saves them tons of time. Teams are also able to use custom rules and set review responses on autopilot to promptly address every incoming review as well.

Review Aggregation

The Online Reputation Management Software aggregates reviews to monitor and build a brand’s reputation by centralizing reviews from websites that matter to it to keep track of what the customers are saying about their experience. The software has tools that aggregate and interpret online reviews and monitor review sites for new and existing negative reviews that could potentially harm the business and directly affect sales.

KPI Reporting

Businesses can measure a range of important metrics like the volume of customer testimonials on social media, customer engagement metrics, the number of brand advocates (social listening metrics), and positive comments on public and third party directories. With these KPI businesses can identify areas that need improvement, attract new leads for the business, and create the brand identity they want.

Competitor Benchmarking

Secure Online Environment

Today, organizations are spread over different geographies and formats. The software allows corporate teams to easily access and share data online without the threat of privacy breaches. The software offers tools to secure privileges and access to authorized team members that can be assigned to different campaigns.

Search and Monitoring

The Online Reputation Management Software offers the ability to track emerging stories, discussions, reviews to their origins or source. This helps in monitoring social media for stories that can then be used to create strategies, marketing plans, generate reports, and future content.

Review monitoring automatically monitors thousands of reviews from different platforms and generates alerts for every new input. This helps businesses stay abreast of customer feedback and not miss positive or negative feedback. The software also has the ability to collate positive online reviews that can be potentially used as testimonials.

Real-Time Notifications

Reputation Management Software offers real-time notifications for online mentions of a brand’s products and services. This can help companies stay on top of viral stories or slander about their brands and effectively combat any negative opinions or perceptions with their own communication strategy.

Review Requests

This feature enables a company to send out invitations to customers to request reviews through emails, SMS, social media, webchat, and mobile app. This ensures that the brand gets higher online mentions thereby picking up traction among search engines.

Bulk Responses

While responding to scores of reviews online can be time-consuming, the Online Reputation Management Software has built-in easy responding tools that help accelerate this process through bulk responding. This basically allows teams to activate responses to a large number of reviews by using features like custom templates and rotating template responses. Custom templates and bulk responding help cut the workload and make it simpler to engage with customers.

AI in Online Reputation Management Software

Monitor Channels Effectively

As social sharing continues to grow across new technologies and platforms, artificial intelligence is playing a vital role in monitoring social media platforms and review forums. AI uses advanced data analysis techniques to understand what customers are saying on social media. What’s more, algorithms can now pick up the tone and language used on posts. Through natural language processing algorithms, a business will be able to easily monitor and manage feedback on its social media handles and sites by picking up these nuances and tweaking their communication accordingly.

Automate Replies

For any business today, managing customer feedback, reviews, or comments online in a timely fashion has become a crucial element. Customers expect quick replies and feedback, and AI ensures that responses can be delivered in a timely manner through automation.

Personalized Responses

Artificial Intelligence can not only manage a brand reputation but also deliver personalized customer experience by understanding data based on a customer’s purchase history and demands. Customers who visit a website will be met with content and products which are aligned to their preferences, thereby providing them with personalized customer experience.

Countering Fake News

AI helps in countering the spread of fake news by rating information for authenticity and finding words or patterns that expose fake online news, stories, or slander regarding the brand.

Integration

Review software is rarely a standalone system and it needs to integrate easily with the rest of the marketing software ecosystem and E-Commerce platform. Similarly, Online Reputation Software also should integrate well with the marketing software ecosystem.

Companies must ensure that the software is compatible with services, directories, and websites which are the most used and trusted review sites that are commonly used by customers like Yelp, Google My Business (Google Maps), TripAdvisor, Facebook Local Pages, Facebook Messenger, etc.

Multichannel Support

Review sources can be varied, so the software should support all social channels and all other popular sources of customer’s voice. Customer review sites are very industry-specific, and hence software should support multiple channels for effective review collection.

Multilingual support

The software should offer a feature of translations of several languages as they cater to users that speak a variety of tongues apart from English. With the text analysis feature, companies or buyers can get automated translation of languages so that they can adequately understand and respond to a review or comment.

Social and Mention Monitoring

The Online Reputation Management Software monitors a company’s social media presence and maps its customer interactions via the likes, dislikes, comments, and reviews they leave. Also, the ability to monitor mentions like how many times a brand is mentioned and in what tone can help businesses to devise their marketing strategies. They can also track key mentions or information regarding it through blogs, websites, news forums, blogs, etc. The depth of this monitoring support is a key factor to consider for purchase decisions.

Legal Compliance

Since the Reviews and Reputation Management Software is used by a wide range of sectors like healthcare, hospitality, and retail that are customer-facing, it is essential that the software is compliant with the legal regulations binding that industry and its players. Many times, violations could attract penalties, fines, sanctions, loss of license to conduct business and end up tarnishing a company’s image.

Data Protection

Data protection is a crucial feature that must be designed into a Reviews and Reputation Management Software itself. The software should protect against data breaches or bugs and it should also be compliant with legal regulations and guidelines about the industry the user or the business operates in.

Challenges in Adopting Reviews and Reputation Management Software

Human Intervention

The reputation management is very rarely 100% automated and it might require human intervention to analyze the results and make sense of results. This requires special skills as well, and organizations need to invest in such resources to take full advantage. Hence it is very common to employ specialized marketing agencies who can provide this holistic solution.

Training and Support

Even after making the transition to deploying an Online Reputation Management Software, companies need regular handholding and support during the implementation of the software and transition period. Major support is required by users in terms of walking their internal teams through the features of the software and regular follow-ups are also necessary post-purchase so that the internal team has greater ease in working with the software.

Overkill Dilutes Brand Image

Many brands use the review request feature to ensure that their loyal customers give them positive reviews. However too many glowing and positive reviews can end up diluting the brand image and customers may find its appeal fading, which can end up harming the brand’s credibility. Studies back up this fact that the presence of negative reviews also establishes the credibility of a brand in a customer’s mind.

Location-Mapping

As teams add more locations for monitoring reviews of retail outlets or franchise stores, it becomes more and more complex for the software to monitor reviews and mentions with each new location. A more robust software will have to be deployed for more than three locations so as to ensure that not only are reviews monitored across all the locations but detailed insights on the online profile are also available in a real-time manner to managers.

ROI of Reviews and Reputation Management Software

Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center analyzed 57,000 reviews from anonymous consumers and 65,000 from verified buyers of almost 13,500 unique products in a range of categories. The study found that the purchase likelihood for a product or a service was 270% greater than the purchase likelihood of a product with no reviews, which makes a strong case for the software being worth investing in for many companies.