In times like these, strengthening your brand is absolutely crucial. Given the COVID-19 pandemic all businesses are battling to retain their customer base, except of course if you’re Amazon or Google. New research by Reputation shows that a massive 76% of consumers invest solely based on business reviews. Reputation is a B2B online reputation management and customer experience management company.
Boost Online and Customer Experience
The challenge of being able to provide customers with the best possible experience from the beginning of the customer journey to the end is something more and more companies are beginning to face. Because of this, it is mostly big-name brands that are going to be successful in delivering world-class customer experience that will thrive. Those who do not, are expected to battle to retain their businesses. But there is a silver lining.
Respond to bad reviews
Reputation also found in the same study that contrary to the above, consumers can be a forgiving bunch. Up to 60% will not react to a negative review if the business involved has taken the step to resolve the issue. The subject of reviews lies with the internet in general. As we all know, before the technological revolution was underway, customers would simply call or pen an angry response to a bad experience if their qualm was with a contact centre. Now, social media has a variety of channels at our fingertips to leave reviews on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other sites like Trip Advisor, for example. The effect of this is businesses are having to work ten-fold to meet high demands and even higher expectations. Where ratings come in, prospects are making their decisions often based on them alone.
Don’t fall behind in the race
Those brands and businesses that fail to reach customer experience expectations and do not take ratings and reviews seriously are punished by search engines. And should they lack a strategy to repair CRMs (customer relationship management) scenarios that have been damaged by bad service, they will over time be perceived as a bad choice for consumers by said search engines.
It takes a lot for Google to make changes to their algorithm, the formula it uses which calculates more than 200 different factors when choosing which websites to display in its results pages, but this step was taken after an online retailer who abused its customers after discovering that the more complaints, bad reviews, and publicity it received the higher its website ranked on the search engine. Google responded by releasing a blog post that they altered their algorithm to discredit the poor reviews so that bad businesses will be penalised. The post read: “Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue.”
The moral of this story? There really is such a thing as bad publicity in the world of CX.
