Why service providers should care about their customers review management.

Service Provider’s are in a competitive field. If you look left or right, you see your competitor with the next hot feature on the market growing their client base. At the same time, you have customers that are hungry for a quick return on their investment. Many times you don’t have the time, cost and human resources to keep up the pace, and if you do, it might not be the best choice to build a new feature yourself but continue focusing on your core. 

So how do you differentiate yourself in the market with multiple players offering similar services? Should you consider licensing plug & play products? Are there products that are easy and affordable to sell? 

In the previous article we talked about a low effort, high return product, presence management with a focus on GBP. The next logical step would be to look into a product that bundles well with this, and forms part of the marketing offer you can implement. Once your merchants have taken control of their online presence, it’s time to help them stand out with review management.

Considering that 98% of consumers consult online reviews before making a purchasing decision, 79% will not purchase or visit a business with a score lower than 3.5, and 53% of consumers expect a response to their negative reviews within a week. It's time to help your customers take their review management seriously. Let’s first understand what this tool entails and then what’s in it for you? 

How to decrease churn and earn ancillary revenue? 

A decade ago, you may have called reviews free marketing. But today, reviews and ratings can serve an even bigger purpose: attract traffic, generate new sales and increase customer loyalty.

Consider an all in one platform

1.     It doesn’t take too much effort to learn about the importance of reviews, what’s harder is to manage them across various platforms and consistently respond to them.  Today however, businesses have no choice but to adapt as users can choose which platform to interact on. For reviews, Google, Facebook and Tripadvisor lead the pack. 

If you were to offer an all-in-one platform to manage reviews, would decrease your customers' time spent on admin, boost their local referencing by signaling that their accounts are active and drive traffic to their website,  service provider app, or socials. Today, there are a variety of softwares on the market that customers can use to answer reviews from different sources in a single platform. Book a free consultation to learn about the available options.

Leverage reviews as part of SEO 

2. SEO goes beyond just optimizing websites and blog articles, it’s time to teach your customers to include keywords in review responses.

There are tools where you can support your customers to use filters to navigate through keywords, languages, scores, to help prepare niche templates allowing you to answer quickly and seamlessly to all reviews. 

It’s also important to help them understand the impact this has on their business, in other words, how you,  are helping them achieve a better standing. Offer a dashboard with insights such as review treatment rate, average score over time, percentage of new reviews and sentiment score. 

Don’t want to build this solution yourself? Book a free consultation

Educate on customer sentiment 

3.  Customer complaint management is a challenging task, and we are all well aware that good customer service is not limited to face-to-face interactions. Looking into customer sentiment can help your merchants or customers make better decisions to improve or leverage a specific product or service. How can they do this? Simply put, through keyword analysis. 

By analyzing online reviews, they can strengthen their customer relationships and ensure consistency across their brand and services. The great news is that the sum of review data can provide 360-degree insight into what consumers think about products, competitors, and the market as a whole, data that is also interesting to a service provider. This however can be a lengthy analytical process without the correct software. 

Offer review boosting

4. Offer a review boosting tool, and no, we aren’t suggesting purchasing reviews online but using tools to help businesses be more effective and keep track of their efforts. Tools now allow businesses to activate  QR codes to place on tables and tickets, or insert the phone number of their customer and send a personalized message post purchase. 

What are the benefits? A significant increase in the number and frequency of the reviews as well as average rating. This means your customers can  automatically improve their GBP positioning, and have a broader lexical field in the reviews to make their way to the first results in Google. 

By implementing these strategies and utilizing review management tools, you can help your customers achieve better results, increase their visibility, and strengthen their customer relationships.

At the end of the day…

Every type of business in a competitive market faces many challenges, today specifically customers are demanding, and review management is one of the portals to customer service. It has to be outstanding to stand out from competitors. Service Providers have the opportunity to position themselves as reliable support for their clients by addressing these challenges.

What’s in it for me?

By acknowledging this reality, Service Providers can benefit from the impact of investing into a review management tool, and teach their customers to actively manage and respond to their online reviews and feedback. 

This strategic approach empowers Service Providers to gain a competitive advantage, boost their recurrent revenue, acquire new customers, foster long-term customer loyalty and create upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

If interested service providers can anonymize and aggregate the data to provide industry benchmarks and reports, creating additional revenue streams through data monetization, or establish themselves as an authority in the field of online reputation management, sharing insights, best practices and though leadership content attracting attention from leads, media, and further boosting the service provider's reputation and visibility.

If you’ve been convinced, and are considering implementing a white-label, review management solution today; or still have some questions on how this can support your growth and your customers, book a free consultation with us today. 

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