Reputation Management and its Impact on Brand Perception

Understanding your existing brand reputation is a vital aspect of becoming a Customer Experience leader within your industry. This is especially true in the present age because of the saturation of online reviews constantly being published on social media sites as well as review-based directories like Yelp. The ability to manage your reputation by filtering, understanding and acting on these online reviews is a relatively new skill, but it is necessary for success in the current business environment.

Because there is such a massive amount of data being constantly produced, it can be challenging to get an accurate understanding of how customers are perceiving and discussing your brand. Regardless of how your organizations is processing this existing information, it is going to have an impact on the way new and existing customers view an organization. 90% of consumers read reviews online before they shop at a business, meaning that if there is something online tarnishing your brand reputation, it is undoubtedly impacting business. Utilize this information ubiquitously-distributed to make specific changes to your Customer Experience platform.

The most prevalent of these review sites is Yelp, which serves as a directory for brands throughout different industries, including a 5-point scaled rating, as well as a library of customer reviews. While commonly known for their restaurant reviews, Yelp helps customers better understand brands throughout every industry. This is an important domain to understand because for every one-star increase in your brand’s Yelp rating, there is up to a 9% increase in overall revenue. In addition to the impact of your starred score, 84% of people consider online reviews at the same level of trust as personal recommendations, meaning that if your brand does not have a positive rating and there are negative reviews prevalent on your Yelp business profile, it will result in countless lost customers.

While maintaining a positive digital reputation is the goal, what actions can a brand take to accomplish this? For larger brands, there is so much information being constantly pushed out that it may seem impossible to get an accurate and up-to-date reading. To conquer this problem, many brands will hire a third-party vendor to filter through the information and provide actionable reports. Like other Customer Experience programs, these vendors will sift through the big data and provide brands with easy to understand information that can be used to directly impact the way your brand is interacting with customers.

Whether it is positive or negative, it is always a good thing to get a better understanding of how people are discussing your brand. If your profile is littered with negative reviews and nothing is done about it, your brand perception will be severely impacted. On the other end of the spectrum, having consistently positive reviews can greatly influence more people to visit your brand. The first step is being able to accurately understand your reputation, only then can you begin to improve it.

1,2,3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanerskine/2017/09/19/20-online-reputation-statistics-that-every-business-owner-needs-to-know/#711bd2a3cc5c

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