Customer Complaints: Protect Your Business Reputation
In today’s world people use the internet almost instantly when hearing about a new product or company. Catch a commercial showing off a new product you could use or instantly think you want? Google it. A friend recommends a local restaurant you haven’t been to before? Look it up on Yelp. As a business or potential employee looks good but you want to make sure? Check them out on Facebook.
A long time ago search engines, mainly Google, evolved and became an every day part of our online activity. We no longer simply use them to search for basic information or the company website for a brand we hear about.
Search engines evolved and turned into a place to find out almost everything you can about companies.
Now you have the ability to look at Yelp reviews, company complaints, social media accounts, and consumer reports all within a few minutes.
So your brand’s reputation online has quickly become one of the first things potential new consumers will see. Especially if the company deals in anything that people can give feedback about. Which seemingly is everything now.
So how can you protect your reputation? Let’s look at three ways to cultivate a positive reputation.
Monitor and Respond to Online Reviews
One of the biggest things customer service professionals will reinforce that all business professionals can learn is that you will never please 100% of your consumers. It is impossible. Eventually someone will be have a less than acceptable experience in their opinion. But another thing to learn is that listening and responding to feedback in a constructive manner can retain that potential future business and even encourage others to give you a chance.
Obviously when good reviews and feedback are directed your way it helps to show appreciation. Be sure to read and reply to reviews on Google.
Interacting with customers will encourage further feedback from others and future business from those providing the feedback. But again not all feedback will always be positive.
Another important place to watch reviews is on Yelp. Yelp is increasingly growing it’s popularity with many industries. Due in part to their large telephone salesforce, almost every small to medium business in America has been contacted by Yelp at least once.
Create Content for Your Customers
Content creation is one of the greatest ways to build an online brand. The creation of your own website or blog of course should be a starting point but stopping there is wasting an opportunity to catch the attention of customers. Create blog posts discussing things your brand makes or even how to use them.
Start and maintain social media accounts to gather followers and interact with both customers and other companies. Fully finish social media profiles with attention to keeping a consistent portrayal of your brand. If you are simply relying on a website and few pictures alone to launch your brand, expect that the results will likely not reach the heights you hope for.
Monitor Your Reputation Online
While not all bad reviews can be directly addressed (you can’t directly remove results from search engines by saying please), you can respond within Google reviews, some feedback sites, and through social media sites. Pay attention to customer complaints or issues reported by loyal customers. Respond and interact through the sources that will allow it, especially if you can within a timely manner.
Showing an honest interest and remaining professional while responding to experiences will show online viewers that they will be listened to. And also show them that your brand can accept criticism and respond in a sound manner, so they will expect professional treatment no matter what. Never fan the flames and end up trading negative remarks online.
Check Your Brand’s Social Media
Social media outlets are definitely changing online interactions. While it is hard to predict the future for the internet, they are the present. So utilizing social media for the growth of your brand is necessary. But social media is all about interacting and that is not a one-way street. If you can create a social media following through outlets like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and others sources then those people will likely begin to interact with you.
But interacting back to both the good, bad, and strange will encourage and grow your online presence. Similar to responding to reviews, responding to customer complaints online will show not only those you interact with but also those that look at your profiles that your brand is active online. That you care about what your customers and potential customers are saying and what they think.
Maintaining a professional and consistent demeanor will help build that reputation you hope to improve because emotional outbursts or out of character actions will often alienate or confuse those that give your profiles a quick glance over.
Having a good or bad reputation online can be a huge deciding factor in a business growing or not. Think of it as the word-of-mouth reputation for the technological age.
Within seconds someone can find multiple ways to read about a business or brand past their own websites. Therefore it has become critical for businesses to monitor and understand their online reputation. Keeping an active and interactive presence will encourage followers to share your name with others and leave positive feedback when asked to. We’re working on improving this for our clients. A couple examples include: Epic Wood Work and Automatic Gate Tech. Google their business name to see progress.
