As you’ve probably noticed, one of the recurring themes in my writing is establishing a business by delivering exceptional customer service. Good customer service is the lifeblood of any business. No amount of marketing or advertising could do the trick without genuinely taking care of the customer’s need at a fair market price. However, your online reputation also plays a major role in the success of your business in this day in age. Are you visible online? How quickly can consumers find your business information? What are you doing to attract potential customers?
In a world where consumers are constantly being presented with relevant or targeted information, even a genuinely caring business can lose out to other competitors that are meeting their customers where they prefer to be found – digitally. Your online presence is one of the most important aspects of your business.
But how do you maintain your online reputation when you’re busy with running your business? The secret is technology. From analyzing market data to automating marketing releases, technology can handle every aspect of building, protecting, and monitoring your brand, so you know exactly what you need to do to raise your quality of service and top line.
Your Online Reputation
Long before the 21st century, before the Internet existed, companies attracted new customers through word of mouth recommendations. The truth is, not much has changed. Except in this day in age consumer recommendations take the form of 1 through 5-star ratings and personal online reviews of our experience.
Now, when consumers hear a recommendation through an advertisement, family, or friend, they turn to apps and review sites to learn more. Your business reputation is a blend of reviews from Yelp, Facebook, Google My Business, TripAdvisor, FourSquare, and so much more. In fact, your business reputation isn’t just tied to your physical address but exists anywhere that people are able to have conversations, both in real life and in the digital realm.
Managing this vast array of touch points associated with your business reputation is a little overwhelming to think about at first, but thanks to recent technology advance it doesn’t have to be. Over the past decade tech companies have discovered unique ways to automate these processes, leveraging technology to handle the most menial and overwhelming of tasks.
From customer’s feedback to surveying market trends, the tools available to business owners help automate the work associating with building your brand, as well as maintaining it. This isn’t just for big businesses, most of these disruptive solutions are completely within reach, helping businesses cut costs and better strategize their brand.
What does this look like? Instead of assigning someone to manually find out what your customers are saying through websites and review listings, your business can set up notifications to alert you when someone says something about your company. It doesn’t stop here, technology can also help you identify what demographics have shown interest in your product or services, their preferred touch points, and snapshots of your consumers at every stage of their buyer’s journey.
Building Your Brand
The best way to build and protect your online business reputation is keeping the quality of your offerings and services comparatively higher than your competitors, including releasing relevant positive and useful information about your offerings on regular basis. The more information you put out there, the more opportunity you give your potential clients to engage with your offerings and your brand. Plus, fresh content and consumer engagement are one of the factors that help you rank on search engines such as Google and Bing. This doesn’t just work to promote your brand, it creates awareness in public and in rare cases also helps to push out any negative content to later pages.
Search engine content is one of the most important aspects of your online reputation. Not only do consumers expect to find the information they are looking for quickly, they expect it to be easy to read, relevant, useful, accurate and engaging. If you don’t meet these high demands in a mere matter of seconds, you will easily lose business to another brand that is.
There are many sophisticated online business reputation management companies that help accomplish these goals in a number of creative ways. Building an online presence isn’t just about creating and attractive website and releasing content, it takes the right type of optimization, both technical and otherwise, for Google to favorably recognize your content as a valuable asset to customers, and therefore worthy of the first page.
Protecting your Brand
Establishing your brand is just the first step. With the amount of competition online, businesses must actively participate in fostering, protecting, and improving their brand image. Working hard to improve the quality of service is important to keeping your customers happy and protecting your brand in long run.
There are organizations that help businesses build, maintain, and protect their business reputation by highlight good reviews and minimize the bad ones. However, this all starts with using the right tools to improve your customer’s experience.
Monitoring Your Brand
Knowing the type of information that is out there about your brand is the first step to improving it. Today, vigilant software is available for businesses to keep an eye on consumer activity surrounding their brand, capturing activity in real time so that businesses may respond quickly to any unfavorable or favorable situation. A number of technologies also help to measure your influence through social media and other marketing efforts, giving you the tools you need to tailor your brand appropriately.
Having the right technology at your fingertips help businesses formulate short-term strategies and long-term customer experience to establish, protect, and grow their brand image online. Analytics and software tools could provide market visibility, backend automation, or simply reports to monitor customer feedback.
Technology and Business Reputation
With so much of our world moving online, it makes sense to leverage technology to our advantage. This isn’t just for larger organizations. In fact, small businesses are one of the biggest benefactors of these tools. No matter where you are in your online journey, don’t hesitate to explore options to achieve excellent customer service and customer experience which will ultimately build and protect your business reputation.
Very nice article.
The good and informative article helps to groom business with the use of technology as It is the easiest way to establish a business by delivering good customer services.