Customer Review management is the process of monitoring customer reviews posted about your brand on websites and social media channels. Every small and large business should actively monitor, analyze, and respond to all reviews, regardless of sentiment.
Managing customer reviews in the right way could help you increase your bottom line.
Customers are influenced by reviews more than any other factor. So, you need to stay on top of what's inside those reviews.
Easier said than done if your business has thousands of reviews that are spread across many different sites.
In this guide, we'll get into the nitty-gritty of how to implement an excellent management strategy and stay on top of customer reviews without having to read them all - including a deep dive into the best software available to help you.
Jump right in to getting the most out of your reviews by clicking through to the most relevant section below.
1 What is Customer Review Management?
2 Customer Review Management Importance
3 How to Manage Reviews
4 Review Management Software
5 Takeaways
What is Customer Review Management?
Review management is the active analysis and regulation of product/service reviews left online about your brand across all platforms.
Great customer review management involves resolving customer concerns in real time, eliminating fake reviews, and active listening across the board in order to project an accurate and positive brand image.
Critically, review management differs from reputation management in that it refers to a specific listening, prompting, and actively acting upon review data alone - it doesn't involve surveys, support chats, or other customer experience related inputs.
Whereas managing your brand's reputation might be a nebulous concept, review management has barometers for success, and tried-and-true techniques that can be leveled to improve where you stand.
Why Is Customer Review Management Important?
Effective customer review management has proven its value statistically.
This value can be underlined by a number of recent statistics:
• A staggering 97% of customers say reviews impact their buying decisions.
• 9 out of 10 customers consult online reviews before making a purchase.
These trends equally apply to local businesses making sales at brick-and-mortar locations, with:
• 82% of customers interested in a local business consult its online reviews first.
Lastly, you'll need to pay particular attention to the severe impact of negative online reviews:
• Recent study found that 4 out of 5 customers reversed their purchase decision if they found negative reviews online.
These numbers only reinforce a truism that applies universally when it comes to customer satisfaction - listening to the voices of your customers is key to providing a great customer experience and staying ahead of competition.
With this in mind, customer reviews are just a smaller part of what should be a comprehensive listening campaign.
But, as in any customer experience management effort, the strategy behind your approach to extracting sentiment is what can separate you from the pack.
Implement the right methodology and tools, and you'll ensure customer loyalty and continued growth - remain stagnant and old, inaccurate reviews can continue to drag you down.
How to Manage Reviews
To ensure that you stay on top of your tools, let's walk through the basic steps that comprise an active and effective review management strategy.
Along the way, we'll note where software could be leveraged to make your job easier - then in the next section we'll go through the best software options currently out there.
Great review management approaches use the following cycle of steps:
Collect existing reviews
Analyze reviews for actionable insights
Prompt new reviews
Monitor results, repeat
Let's jump right in - each section will outline best general practices and provide links to further assist your implementation.
Review Management Software
Whether your goal is just to get your first review management strategy off the ground, or to fine tune an existing endeavor, the software on the market is only getting better and better.
Fit, above all else, is what will matter. Take stock of what your current needs are, then peruse the following list of industry leading software and read into which might be the best one for you.
Monkeylearn - Power at scale
Podium - Local business jumpstarter
ReviewTracker - Active management suite
Trustpilot - Innovative review showcasing
BirdEye - Customizable local review management
Takeaways
Making choices is hard. That's true for you, the business, just as much as it is for your customers. So don't feel bad if you don't feel totally comfortable with how you are managing your reviews online - as web usage grows, so do the number of review sources.
Great review management is about constantly keeping pace with this changing environment. Implementing tools that do most of the running for you frees up your personnel to make strategic decisions, not sift through gigantic datasets.
While any of the above software can help lift some of your load, when it comes to delivering accurate insights, Monkeylearn's AI-powered analysis is second to none. Sign up for free today and see the results we can deliver.
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