No matter which activity branch you’re in, your local e-reputation widely depends on the customers experience and the reviews and ranking they attribute to your store. Depending on how you act, those review can be a boost for your business or a menace as well. Dear Community Managers, here are the key steps to an effective review management!
6 Best tips to manage your local e-reputation efficiently
1. Use the right channels to manage your online reputation
Two main medias are widely above others for this purpose, Google and Facebook. Google is an effective platform as it includes Google Search and Google Maps. Furthermore, Google recently added a feature that invites customers to leave a review about the location they just visited. This also counts for Facebook with “Facebook Places”.
But there are other sources that can be relevant for your business too. If your business is about travelling and tourism for example, TripAdvisor and Booking are definitely channels you should consider. Other specific sources exists for a variety of businesses, find out which media/channel is the most relevant to your business, and start interacting with your audience!
2. Determine the right tone of voice
You should define a general tone of voice and adapt it depending on the number of stars and the content of the review. The type of communication you’ll use will have a huge impact on how your brand is perceived by your local audience. Defining a tone of voice will also ensure that your communication stays aligned on the long term and will also be a reference point for new community managers within your organization.
Here are some questions that can help you determine the right tone of voice:
- Should we use a formal or an informal communication?
- Can we use humour in our communication? If yes, what are the limits/boundaries?
- Should we use an active or passive communication?
- Etc.
3. Prepare a few fixed answers to save time and have a reference point
The incoming reviews you’ll receive can be divided in three categories:
- Neutral reviews and ratings.
- Negative reviews and ratings.
- Positive reviews and ratings.
In order to tackle each situation, you should prepare a few answers for each case and of course, set the tone of voice right.
Important notice: Personalize each fixed answer to the context before posting your answer, online users prefer to see a personal message.
4. If you encounter a difficult conversation, take this discussion off the online landscape
Sometimes you’ll have to deal with more sensitive issues and volatile discussions. In order to avoid putting your brand in harm’s way, you should remove the negative review.
Before using this last resort, there are a few options you can explore:
- Find out who the unsatisfied customer is and why he had a bad experience.
- Contact this person in private, apologise for the misunderstanding and try to solve the problem together.
- If your intervention was successful you can ask him to consider adapting his first review.
5. Create a dashboard to monitor the evolution of your store’s local e-reputation
A dashboard is essential to measure the impact of your efforts, your customer’s satisfaction and their specific needs.
You should organise your dashboard in a way that you can easily check your performance indicators, this way you’ll be able to check your overall ROI very quickly.
6. Ask yourself if you can want to involve Store managers in this process/ in the process of review management
Make sur to take a look at our in-depth article on how you should involve your local Store managers into review management.
