Improve online reputation? How feedback can help

Online reviews have become much more important than ever before, especially for your online reputation. When buying a product or service, (potential) customers are starting to look at the online reviews of other users on social media and review sites. But not just your customers do this. Also, potential employees read reviews on the Internet before deciding whether to work for you. But how do you get a grip on this? This blog post will teach you more about online reputation management with the help of customer and employee feedback gathered with surveys.

The importance of online reviews

Your online reputation is one of the most important factors for purchasing a product or service. 90% of consumers surf the Internet and read online reviews before visiting a business. And 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. The importance of your online employer reputation is becoming more and more important as well, as employer reviews at employee review sites, like Glassdoor, Indeed and Monster are invaluable resources for jobseekers.

No matter the size of your business, your customers, employees, and prospects are talking about you: tweeting about your product, posting a Facebook update about their customer experience, leaving a review on review sites, and much more.

However, what often happens is that there is a biased online impression of your company or brand as not many people will spontaneously leave a review unless they are extremely happy or unhappy with your product or service.

Online reputation management? Feedback can help

If you are collecting feedback from customers or employees, for example with the help of customer satisfaction or NPS research, use this to ask respondents at the end of your survey to post a review on the review platform or social channel appropriate to your organization. By doing this, you only have to ask for feedback once and can get a grip on your online reputation.

Some examples

• A customer or employee fills in your survey and gives a high score, for example, an 8, 9, or 10. At the end of the survey, ask these promoters of your brand to leave a review on a platform of their choice, or a platform that is important for your brand at that moment. For sure they will leave a positive review.
• Ask respondents who give a lower score, a 6 or 7 for example, at the end of the questionnaire to follow your brand on social media.
• When a customer or employee gives a negative score or has a complaint, send this feedback immediately to the right responsible person for follow-up. A complaining customer or employee can become an ambassador if the complaint is handled well, but don’t wait too long to solve it.

Three tips on how to improve your online reputation

1. Guide all review sites from one system
   Manage independent review sites from one easy-to-use system. Send all feedback gathered automatically to different important review sites such an Opiness, Trustpilot, or The Feedback Company. This way you can easily get a grip on your online reputation.
2. Prevent online reputation damage and transform negative feedback
   Does a customer or employee fill in your survey and give a low score? Send a notification to the right responsible person immediately, so the respondent can be contacted personally. By doing this and listening to your respondents, they feel heard, and you can prevent them from talking negatively about your company online. If the complaint is handled well, a complaining customer or employee can become an ambassador, which will lead to a positive review!
3. Involve the entire organization
   Realize that your online reputation is something of concern to the entire organization. Work together to improve the online image and customer satisfaction during the entire customer journey. By sharing results and reviews in real-time with powerful and custom build dashboards and infographics you can involve everybody in the organization.

How CYS can help

With CYS, you can not only gather customer or employee feedback with surveys, but our software also lets you have more control of reviews by automatically leading positive customer feedback to different review websites of your choice. With one software solution, you can guide all review sites and only need to ask customers for feedback once.

Based on the score customer or employees give in your survey, you can automatically refer them to the review sites that are most important to your organization, such as Trustpilot, Google, The Feedback Company, and Glassdoor. This helps you to get a grip on your online reputation.

Does customer or employee feedback need to be followed up? Immediately create a task for or send a trigger mail to the right responsible person who can contact the respondent and solve the problem before it is too late and will harm your online reputation.

Summary

It has become a big challenge to manage your online reputation as customers and employees have a lot of options to leave a review about your company or product on the Internet, such as review websites and social media platforms. You might be using a feedback tool to gather feedback from customers and employees. If so, use this to have more control of your reviews and to manage your online reputation in one central place. In this blog post, we give you some examples and you can read how to do this.

Plan your demo

Did we make you curious? Book a personalised demo of our software. In this 30-minute demo you will see how you can manage your online reputation with CYS.