Having a great online reputation doesn’t have to be hard - making sure your company has happy and satisfied customers is the key to success.
That’s why at Trustpilot, we help you surface their voice so they can tell the world what a great job you are doing. Managing your online reputation is also essential because it is the no. 1 way to build trust with consumers. Indeed, over 93% of consumers said they read reviews before buying online from an unfamiliar company.
Yet, many companies fail to do so. One of the reasons why is that companies lack strategies to build their online reputation, and expect their customers to do the job for them. Great online reputation requires dedication and a clear strategy on how to generate great customer feedback. Your customers probably love the work that you do, but you should be the one to encourage them to share their positive experiences.
There are three simple rules that all companies should follow if they want to improve their online reputation strategy. One is, of course, to start collecting reviews, which are easy for consumers to write. Another rule is that you, as a business, should have a clear review strategy in place: What is your goal when collecting feedback? What do you want to learn? How can you grow and improve?
The third and final strategy you should follow to improve your online reputation is to learn to display the great feedback you have collected. Consumers love to read about other people’s experiences and to discover new companies through user-generated content. Did you know that nearly 62% of online shoppers perform a company search when unfamiliar with the brand name – and few are likely to buy if they see negative reviews on the first page of the search results? Something to think about...
So how can I get an overview of my online reputation?
When we talk to businesses, we often hear that they try to employ a wider strategy to better understand and manage their online reputation. Many companies use different services to collect customer feedback, such as review platforms or social media. Many also do manual market research to find out perhaps why similar companies in their industry are performing better.
To help speed up the process, Trustpilot recently released Benchmark to help you get an overview of how you are performing in Trustpilot. This simple, yet effective tool can provide aggregated information from public data on Trustpilot, and help you get an overview of how your company and other companies are performing while allowing you to dive deeper into how you can use Trustpilot better.
3 Ways to strengthen your online reputation strategy
Once you have a benchmark to measure your improvements against, you can set up a clear strategy. If you recall earlier we mentioned that there are three simple rules that help companies achieve a great reputation.
Let’s dive deeper into how each of these rules can help your company grow online and connect with more consumers.
1. Customer feedback will always be important
More reviews mean more customer feedback to learn from. Having more positive reviews can also improve your overall TrustScore. Today, 82% of shoppers are more likely to purchase after reading positive star ratings and reviews.
There are multiple ways to improve your review collection and subsequently influence a better TrustScore. Start by making sure your customers are happy with your service! Moving from manual to automatic invitations can be helpful to streamline the whole process. Finally, collecting product reviews, along with service reviews, can sometimes increase the number of reviews you can collect.
2. Keep working to improve your rating
What makes a customer leave a 4-star review instead of a 5-star one? Collecting scores is great, but real qualitative feedback lies in each review.
Can you improve that review? Certainly. Consumers who have spent time ranking their experience and sharing their feedback through a review obviously care about your company and its customer service, but they’re also warning you and other consumers that there is room for improvement.
If your goal is to get a great online reputation, then you should set up a strategy that will respond to these consumer signals and will help you improve and grow your business. Trustpilot can help with analytics or AI tools that will gather actionable insights, but ultimately it is your decision whether or not to act upon the consumer feedback.
3. Make sure your business is easy to find
We know that consumers like to search for, and discover new companies. There are multiple types of research which found that over 90% of consumers research companies and read reviews before making a purchase.
You should make sure your company is ranking in the right places, be that search, social media, or any other listing that helps customers discover new companies, like Trustpilot’s category directory. Trustpilot updated the categories based on Google MyBusiness categories to make sure all consumers can easily identify companies. Trustpilot is also allowing companies to choose the categories themselves.
This is why in the new Trustpilot Benchmark tool, Trustpilot has added a transparent overview of your categories, and categories of similar companies you want to view. We hope this tool will help you better understand your position and guide you towards a better online reputation strategy. Disclaimer: The information presented in this tool is for your company’s internal use only and may not be used externally in any way, for example, to make comparative advertising.
If you’re not a Trustpilot user (just yet!) and would like to learn more about our new Benchmark tool, please request a free Trustpilot demo by clicking the banner below.
