Level up your online reputation strategy with deep listening and brand intelligence technology

In a business landscape where brand affinity means as much online as off, reputation is everything! So, how does a business create and maintain a positive reputation throughout every physical and digital customer interaction? And how can marketing teams continually improve customer sentiment and build a successful 5-star reputation management strategy?

It all comes down to listening. Deep listening, understanding, and engaging with customers at every point of their omnichannel buying journey. By authentically connecting with people through online reviews, star ratings, and social media comments, brands can access the next-level intelligence they need to build genuine relationships, boost retention, and create exceptional customer experiences (CX).

Here are three ways to enhance a brand reputation strategy, attract new customers — and keep them loyal for life.

1. Monitor your online presence 24/7 through listings, reviews, and social media

Business listings and reviews are typically where consumers have their first experience with a brand in their initial search process. Make sure that that first impression is sparkling! The last things you want are bad reviews pushing people away or inaccurate listings causing frustration and confusion — all before someone even had a chance to experience the brand.

A positive online presence is essential for brand success. Nearly 97% of people say they’ve used online listings and reviews to help them choose a business. From Google to Yelp to Instagram, listings, reviews, and social channels reflect a brand’s online reputation to the world. Never lose sight of how your presence appears to consumers considering your business.

Actively monitor and track your online presence to clearly understand what customers say about your brand — the good and the bad. Identify potential issues, uncover surprising wins, and find ways to use that information to enhance CX brand-wide.

By tracking channels like Google, Facebook, Bing, and TikTok, brands can deeply understand a customer’s overall sentiment — positive, negative, and neutral. A comprehensive reputation management suite with deep listening capabilities facilitates this task with ease by mining and analyzing deep and surface-level customer feedback data. From there, users can seamlessly collect, interpret, and report on metrics like brand sentiment, popular keywords, customer feedback, star ratings, and competitor mentions.

With metrics illuminating how people feel about a brand, marketing teams can better grasp consumer sentiment in real-time, improve in-store, online, and hybrid CX, and consistently improve products or services based on solid metrics.

2. Actively listen and respond to all customer feedback

Not only are listings and reputation updates and optimization an ongoing job — teams also must reply to every online review with a genuine response. According to Hubspot, 79% of consumers expect a response on social media in 24 hours or less. From questions about current hours to complaints about a rude employee, people want answers (and resolutions) fast!

Whether feedback is vague, negative, or positive, taking time to address customers shows both the original poster and those reading posts from past customers that a brand truly cares about their experiences. Additionally, 33% of people will change a negative review to a positive one if a brand replies with empathy and works to resolve the issue. That alone could significantly boost ratings.

A review response strategy allows brands to turn negative customer experiences into positive ones, create authentic customer engagement, boost brand loyalty, and increase customer acquisition. It also helps with brand content visibility. The more conversation there is around a business, the more customers will see the organization as caring humans striving to enhance their customer experience — not just robots on auto-response.

For multi-location brands, it’s often tricky for businesses to ensure every reviewer gets a fast, appropriate, and authentic response. Use our best online review response practices as a guide when responding to reviews:

• Create review response templates: With review response templates, your team can quickly address reviews for many reasons while customizing each to ensure authenticity. Check out our pre-written review response templates and best practices to get you started.
• Maintain your brand voice: Don’t forget that review responses are an extension of your brand’s personality. Develop brand guidelines to steer how you want your review responses to sound. Most importantly, always be friendly and positive while remaining professional.
• Be honest and transparent: Everyone makes mistakes. Don’t be afraid to own it and do all it takes to make it right. When the inevitable angry review happens, remain open and honest, offer a solution, and if things get unpleasant, try to turn the situation around by inviting the conversation offline.
• Speed up with the right tools: Don’t assume review response is impossible for large enterprises or small teams. Innovative and emerging review response technologies like bulk response and AI-powered suggested response support brands in maintaining genuine online customer relationships while expediting the process.

By owning up to mistakes, sincerely apologizing, and striving for a resolution, you show the original reviewer and those reading the interaction that your brand cares about CX.

3. Listen. Analyze. Learn. Act. Repeat.

Once a brand consistently tracks, listens, and responds to customer feedback, it can use this invaluable intelligence to level up an omnichannel, enterprise-wide CX strategy.

Do the keywords “employees” or “wait” consistently rise up as negative sentiments? Drill down to uncover exactly where, when, and why. Then enact rapid strategic adjustments to make it right. Are customers in a test market raving about a new product in your online reviews? Gather the hard metrics to support an initiative for a nationwide launch to share with the top decision-makers. Is the brand’s overall star rating suddenly dropping? Dig deeper into listings and reputation data to identify potential causes.

There are just three ways teams can gather and use real-time brand intelligence from online listings and reputation analysis. Set the right benchmarks, track the proper metrics, and refine your reputation management strategy with hard data.

Build trust with the first engagement and rapidly establish brand credibility, affinity, and loyalty. Level up with Chatmeter’s deep listening and brand intelligence solutions. On a user-friendly dashboard, gather data and streamline your brand’s listing and reputation management process. With Chatmeter, you’ll never miss a beat when it comes to your customers.

See how Chatmeter works firsthand. Explore our Interactive Chatmeter Overview Dashboard Demo here. Then, schedule a free demo customer just for your brand and its unique needs.