Renowned customer experience thought leader Blake Morgan shares her insights into how online review management can make or break customer experience.
If you’re a business owner, chances are you rely on reviews to attract and retain customers. Whether reviews are good or bad, your customers will look to those sites to better understand your reputation to decide if they should trust you with their business.
According to Gartner, organizations with stronger reputations are 31% more likely to exceed their business performance goals.[1] Business owners and public relations managers who utilize reputation management software to build out and send review forms at scale while using sentiment analysis will have a leg up over their competition. But the human touch is still vital when responding to negative reviews and making sure the form asks the right questions.
Capterra’s 2024 Elusive Online Consumer survey found that customer reviews are incredibly impactful on purchase decisions.* After price, user reviews are the second most important factor in a consumer’s purchase decision.
Blake Morgan, a customer experience thought leader agrees.
“Most of us don’t even trust a product that hasn’t been reviewed. We really trust our peers more than we trust marketers or advertisers.”
Blake Morgan
Customer experience thought leader
We summarized Morgan’s insights from a series of interviews—along with findings from a Capterra survey* of 5,585 consumers worldwide—to show you that managing your online reputation with both the human touch and reputation management software can make a difference in the success of your business.
Tailor your review form to customers’ ideal experience
Morgan says that business owners should listen to their customers in order to fully understand what they’re comfortable with.
Her advice? Be as specific as possible.
“The more specific you can get in what you ask for, whether it’s a form or some text when you’re soliciting a review from a customer, the better it will be,” Morgan says. “It will help customers understand how your product will work for them.”
The first step to getting a handle on your online reputation is to create a custom reviews form that elicits the best, most relevant feedback from your customers. This is something Morgan says she looks for herself when she’s shopping online. She wants to see what reviews look like from other consumers before making a purchase.
“I want to know from other customers if they’re the same size and weight as me because sizes can differ from brand to brand,” says Morgan.
It's important to ask the right questions to increase customer engagement and provide a more meaningful experience for new customers who are reading your reviews. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what information would be most important to you when purchasing your product.
For example, if you’re in retail, ask for reviews with pictures of your customers actually using the product. If it’s clothing, ask them to show what it looks like on them. If it’s a board game, ask to see a picture of them playing it with friends. This will increase engagement and provide your customer with a meaningful, long-lasting impression of your product.
Reputation management software often comes with review generation features that can help your business share positive reviews through feedback surveys, forms, and multi-channel marketing campaigns. These forms are often customizable and can include your branding along with any questions specific about your product/brand that you want to get feedback on.
Reputation management software has core features, such as review monitoring and social media monitoring, so that business owners can track and monitor their online reputation through multiple platforms and search engines. These features alert users in real-time when customers share feedback or comment on social media posts. In fact, 88% of reviewers say that review monitoring is a highly important feature.*
In addition to those core functionalities, reputation management software frequently includes several common features, such as review generation, review requests, response management, and survey creation.
An example of a custom form generator in software (Source)
If you’re not sure you have the budget to commit to dedicated reputation management software just to create customer forms, several free survey creation tools exist. These tools require more manual work to send the forms out to your customers and the data collection features aren’t as robust, but testing the waters before committing to a year-long or multi-year contract is a good idea.
Use reputation management software to elicit more reviews and monitor sentiment
Not all reviews are valued equally. According to our survey, consumers rate review websites as the most trustworthy source of reviews (48%), followed by friends or family (46%).* Far fewer consumers say internet search engines (30%), online message boards or chat forums (25%, e.g., Reddit), or e-commerce marketplaces (22%, e.g., Amazon) are trustworthy sources for reviews.
Additionally, consumers are wary of social media reviews that may be sponsored or biased:
76% of consumers trust product reviews made by social media users who are not influencers versus 34% who trust product reviews made by social media influencers.
The fact that 61% of consumers view negative reviews as critical to their purchase decision and actively seek them out for products slightly more often than they seek out positive reviews (59%), plus their distrust of reviews from people they don't know, likely reflects the preponderance of fake and sponsored reviews that have cluttered sites such as Amazon—consumers have to be careful about which reviews they trust because it's getting harder to tell when reviews are created by bots, or influenced by deals with brands.
Having a killer reviews form doesn’t matter much unless you’re able to convince your customers to leave reviews for people to read. That’s why reputation management software can be so helpful; it can automatically send follow-up emails to customers who have interacted with your business to elicit feedback.
After all, the best time to ask a customer for a review is immediately after a meaningful interaction with them. This could be right after they make an online purchase to ask about how the shopping experience went or right after their item gets delivered to their home or business.
An example of what an automatic review request might look like (Source)
Your review request should be concise and stress the importance of reviews to your business. The more customized to the individual customer you can make the request, the better. If you have their name and the item they purchased, include that in the request. Software can often do this for you automatically.
As an example, language such as, “understanding what our customers think about us is the most important thing to improving our products and services” can go a long way in eliciting customer feedback.
Customize your message based on your brand guidelines. If your brand is more eccentric, make the language more playful. If you’re more serious, keep it serious. The most important thing is making your customer feel like their feedback is going to be valued.
Additionally, most reputation management software tools use natural language processing (NLP) to identify positive, negative, and neutral customer sentiments and actively engage with customers to protect their brand’s image.
An example of sentiment analysis features in reputation management software (Source)
This can help you identify trends and insights related to your brand’s image. Your software will convert all of the data it collects into easy-to-understand charts and reports to help you make an action plan to better optimize your business strategies based on the data.
Negative reviews can be the best marketing tool in your arsenal so listen closely and respond thoughtfully
According to Capterra’s 2024 Elusive Online Consumer survey, 61% of consumers say the number of negative reviews is a critical attribute when deciding to buy a product.*
The fact that consumers actively seek out negative reviews for products more often than they seek out positive reviews shows that consumers want to be careful about which reviews they trust, because it's getting harder to tell when reviews are created by bots, or influenced by deals with brands.
Luckily, you can use negative reviews to your advantage if you’re careful and thoughtful.
“Sometimes a negative customer experience can actually improve not only the relationship with that individual customer but everyone who reads that review as well,” says Morgan.
She goes on to stress that by responding to negative reviews in a timely, thoughtful manner, you’ll impress upon future customers that your business has a customer experience mindset which can help improve your chance that that customer will make a purchase from your business.
An example of how reputation management software can organize your reviews (Source)
Between Google Reviews, Facebook reviews, Yelp, Trip Advisor, Glassdoor, and any other review site your business might be on, you have a lot of ground to cover. Doing it all manually each day is possible, but scraping all incoming reviews and responding to them in one place can save you a lot of time.
Reputation management software can help make it easier to respond to every customer review that comes your way by helping you track and monitor customer reviews on multiple platforms, such as social media, review sites, and search engines.
Morgan’s advice: Own up to your negative reviews to help strengthen your online reputation.
“Don’t delete negative reviews,” she says. “Use those insights to improve your products and services and show the whole world that you aren’t afraid to respond to a negative review and you’re not going to delete it from your website because it makes you look bad."
There are a few things to keep in mind when responding to negative reviews:
Don’t take it personally. Things can get nasty online, but it’s imperative that you respond in a professional, courteous tone.
Acknowledge the reviewer’s concerns. Unless the review is entirely unreasonable or untrue, don’t spend the whole response refuting or debunking their complaints.
Pay attention to what caused the patient to have the negative experience, acknowledge it, and offer a solution if possible.
Do not offer discounts or placations as doing so in a public response could encourage other reviewers to leave negative reviews in an effort to get similar compensation.
In short, reputation management is one of the few free ways to drastically improve your brand reputation. While software can help manage and track trends and patterns in your reviews data, the most important thing is to simply respond to each and every review that you receive in a human, humble, and reasonable manner.
A combination of software and the human touch is crucial
It’s clear that having a handle on your online reputation is critical to the success of your business, and without the help with automation and organization that reputation management software provides, it can be difficult, frustrating, and time-consuming to manage it all on a daily basis.
Whether that’s having to send review request emails manually, respond to reviews amongst all platforms, or manage sentiment, there’s no question that automation can help make your life easier.
Morgan leaves business owners with some final thoughts on this subject: “Listen to customers that are upset, let them vent, then respond and make meaningful changes based on their concerns. This is the best marketing that you could ever do.”
If you want more insights from Blake Morgan, check out our series of interviews with her:
You might not have the bandwidth to handle managing your reputation and branding yourself. If that’s the case, you might want to consider hiring a branding agency service to handle some of the heavy lifting for you.
Our downloadable branding agency evaluation scorecard template can provide your business with objectives and performance measures to help you find the best agency for your specific needs.
