Leveraging Online Review Trends to Create Enhanced Customer Experiences

Online review trends are urging businesses to pay attention to the opinions and feedback of their customers expressed on the Internet. Consumers don't want to trash-talk your business or destroy your career. They just need to be heard.

Buyers expect an acceptable customer experience when they do business with you. And when they don't get it, they warn others away, like the Poshmark user who left a review stating:

I wish someone had written this for me as I would've never moved forward with purchasing something from them…They did nothing to try and help me or keep me as a customer.

Online review trends are showing that customers are often taking to negative reviews as a means of last resort. They try contacting the company first, but when they can't reach or find a reasonable solution with the customer management team, consumers take their complaints online as a means of trying to right what they feel is wrong.

Companies are in a great place to strengthen bonds with customers and attract new ones, but only if they are willing to learn from the online review trends and statistics.

Create Your Company's Response Policy

Before you can truly create positive customer experiences, you need to decide what you want that experience to look like. What is your response policy? What industry best practices match your company's brand and vision?

Determine the various channels through which customers can engage with your team members. Then, train your staff on the methodology you determined your company will project. Train all of your employees on essential communication and customer experience management.

As a bonus, aligning your vision, brand, and customer experience policy will reinforce the expectations for how everyone in your company treats your customers and each other. After all, it's not just customers reading reviews. 86% of employees and job seekers research business reviews to determine if your company is worthy of an application when you're hiring.

Publicly Engage With Customers

Rather disturbingly, a recent online review survey found that 14.8% of survey respondents were threatened by a company to delete a negative review the customers had posted online. Obviously, starting a conversation to threaten customers is a bad strategy, but responding to their reviews in the right way is a terrific opportunity to grow your business.

About 81% of customers are likely to leave a positive review if your business goes above and beyond in customer service. Also, consumers tend to leave favorable feedback detailing their interaction if they initially had a negative experience that was turned into a very positive one by the company.

But what if things didn’t go well in the initial transactions, and the consumer leaves a negative review about your company? Good news! Most of them are inclined to choose a business if they can see the owner has responded to all reviews.

That means it’s time to put your new response policy to work! Publicly thank the customers who left positive reviews and invite them to shop with you again. Then, put on your courteous demeanor and address the negative reviews thoughtfully and tactfully.

Remember that most customers have left negative feedback online, hoping it will reach your eyes and that you’ll help them resolve the issue that hasn’t yet been solved. That makes the strategy simple. Acknowledge the customer so they feel heard and offer to help them find a solution. Consider your response strategy and then provide a means to contact the right person in the right way for issue resolution.

Even if the customer isn’t interested in a dialogue, everyone else can see that you listened to and positively engaged the reviewer.

Keep Track of Trends

Data should be driving your customer management strategies. Online review statistics should be easily compiled and used to benchmark and improve your approach to social media, online review boards, articles, and any other online source where customers may be talking about your company and trying to find some help.

Fortunately, you don’t have to monitor the whole internet yourself to see every time your company is mentioned or a new review is posted. Various reputation management tools are available to simplify the process of addressing reviews and enhance the overall customer experience.

Whether you use software or find in-house strategies to monitor customer reviews and responses, your best practice is to stay on top of feedback, have a plan to address it, and use every review to start a positive dialogue with customers.