How to improve customer experience with review management

The term Customer Experience, or CX, gets thrown around a lot these days. Improving it is seen as a competitive differentiator and it has even become the number one priority for a number of businesses. The only problem is, many businesses lack the information needed to understand what changes are actually going to make the experience better for their customers.

What if I told you that you already have access to some of the most powerful and game-changing information around? Well, you do and the right review management platform can help you to access it and convert it into actionable data.

The CX Influence on Future Shoppers

Customer Experience is about more than just the way people interact with your brand online. It’s about more than the service you provide in stores and the quality of the product customers take home with them.

When it comes down to it, Customer Experience is about perception. No matter what you think about your brand or the experience you provide, the customer experience is what each of your customers perceives it to be.

While the customer experience is unique to each customer, each of these unique experiences influences a much larger number of people. Thanks to online reviews and social platforms, customers have the ability to instantly share their experiences with millions of other shoppers – and these other shoppers are listening. Over 90% of customers will actively seek out reviews to determine the quality and get a feeling for the experiences offered by a local business.

Reviews have become a valuable resource for shoppers because they get to read first-hand examples of what real customers experience with your business were really like.

As customers search the Internet for local businesses and evaluate their options they will read your reviews to form a perception about the experience and service you provide. They will then do the same for your local competitors and make a final decision about which business to visit based off of which brand they perceive to provide the best customer experience.

Understanding and Improving the Current Customer Experience

Your reviews aren’t just valuable to the potential customers reading them; they can be equally as valuable to you and your business as well. With the right tools, reviews can help you understand a lot about the way customer perceive your business and how you can improve those perceptions in order to better the overall customer experience.

Review Response Strategies

52% of customers who have left a bad review expect to receive a response from the business within 7 days or less and 21% expect a response within 24 hours. This expected response time is reduced even further for comments and reviews that are left on social media, with 46% of consumers expecting a response within just 6 hours!

Having the ability to quickly respond to both positive and negative reviews is a powerful tool for understanding and improving your customer’s perceptions. First, responding to negative reviews and inviting the conversation offline allows you to dive deeper into what went wrong and help you make the right changes moving forward.

Responding to customer reviews will also help improve the perceptions of both those who left the review and those who will be reading them. Review responses show others that your business is listening to what your customers have to say, cares enough to respond, and is even willing to make changes to improve the overall customer experience.

Measure Customer Trends Through Reviews

It seems like there is no end to the number of customer review sites, industry-specific sites, social media platforms, and search directories that are scattered around the web influencing your potential customers. The time it would take to find and track all this data manually makes measuring trends nearly impossible.

With today’s Brand Reputation Management Analytics, businesses can easily and automatically aggregate all their reviews into one location.

Having all your reviews automatically pulled into one unified location allows you to easily track trends and monitor changes in your reviews across your entire business. You can monitor each of your stores individually, track trends across different regions, or roll all that data up into one enterprise-wide report.

Tracking your reviews and trends in this way allows you to immediately pinpoint problem areas and negative trends, allowing you to make the right changes in the right places. Your ability to improve customer’s perceptions of your business increases when you can respond quickly to any occurrences of poor customer experience.

Customer Sentiment Analysis

With some brands receiving upwards of thousands of reviews every month it can be extremely difficult to understand how people perceive your brand and how those perceptions change over weeks, months and years. Customer sentiment analysis gives you the ability to derive some of the most insightful data about your customer’s experience and the way customers perceive your brand.

On the most basic level, sentiment analysis breaks down every review into statements and identifies key topics within each statement. From there, it will then identify whether the sentiment around each topic is positive, neutral or negative.

For example, if an Italian restaurant receives a review that says, “They had the most amazing pizza ever, but the service could use some improvements”, the sentiment analysis engine will tell you that review contained positive sentiment around the topic pizza and negative sentiment around the topic service. In essence, it gives you the ability to track the perceptions around the topics most important to your business, allowing you to understand what your customers are saying and make any changes where necessary.

(Click HERE to learn more about Pulse, Chatmeter’s sentiment analysis tool, and how it works)

What is the Opposite of a Downward Spiral?

The changes you make are going to lead to happier customers, happier customers lead to more positive reviews, and more positive reviews lead to more customers. It’s like an upward spiral of positivity that is driving more customers into your stores and drastically increasing your revenue.

Schedule your FREE demo with Chatmeter to learn how our review management platform can help you improve your customer’s experience and drive more new customers into your stores.