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Transforming your Reviews & Reputation Management Tool into a Relationship Builder
If we have learned anything in the past few years it’s that an SMB’s success is tied directly to their online reputation. No matter how good the product, how superb the service, if someone has a negative experience and smears it across the web then the business is losing money. Study results reveal that just one negative review can cause a business to lose as many as 22% of customers.
Merchants can not only see the effects to their own businesses, but they are also being told from every direction that they must manage their reputations by streamlining their testimonial generation and negative review suppression.
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According to the TripAdvisor-Ipsos MORI study released in July of 2018, 97% of US business owners surveyed said that online reputation management was important to their business. SMBs are on the hunt for the software that will serve them best in the upcoming year, and POS developers are perfectly poised to deliver, not only bringing value to their merchants but increasing incremental revenue for their own businesses as well.
The key to success this year is all about streamlined processes and centralized data. Gone are the days of the a la carte service repertoire. Merchants no longer want or need to choose a separate business and subscription for every other service they need. They already have a Point of Sale, why not get the most out of an existing trusted relationship?
Let’s consider how, when combined with a few other offerings a Reputation Management tool can become even more powerful.
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The Customer Data Platform (CDP) –
Consider how much data is collected through the POS, such as buying preferences, visit frequency, and spending habits. The depth of understanding that can be reached by connecting that data to a reviews and reputation management tool is powerful. Not only can the merchant see that a certain customer hasn’t been into the store in an unusually long time, but they will also be alerted if that customer writes a negative review on a popular site such as Trip Advisor. Before, that absence may not have been noticed and the lost revenue would have been marked off as a lost cause.
The 2018 Online Reviews Report released by Review Trackers revealed that “53 percent of customers expect businesses to respond to negative reviews within a week. But 63 percent say that a business has never responded to their review.”
The beauty of the integrated CDP lies in the power and knowledge it gives merchants so they can efficiently personalize their responses to negative reviews, and more effectively reach those unhappy consumers.
The Integrated Payments Solution –
Part of the value in a CDP is how it helps condense data down into unique profiles. Drawing upon securely stored payments data not only brings to light the quantifiable impact behind a customer’s discontent, but it also allows the merchant to act as quickly as possible to repair the relationship. Using a protected P2PE solution with tokenization options, the merchant can quickly and securely perform a refund, or offer store credit associated with that specific customer. The offer can even be personalized based on the customer preferences profile, built out by a combined CDP and payments solution.
The Marketing Automation Tool –
Finally, once the business is able to understand what went wrong and to offer a timely and meaningful repair, the trust and relationship will need to be reestablished over time. With an automated marketing tool, nurturing those injured relationships is no longer a full-time job. From the moment a customer first submits a negative review they can be placed on a consumer retention program. It begins with the merchant immediately addressing the issue at hand, but it continues with a carefully timed campaign of appreciation and reconciliation offers tailored for the customer’s preferences.
When combined with a robust suite of integrated products, a reviews and reputation management tool is transformed into an entire relationship building and maintenance system. And while all of that knowledge and the steps that follow seem like a lot of work to manage, a strong CDP foundation can actually allow for a fully automated system to be established. This leaves room for the merchant and their staff to focus their energy back on creating a great customer experience from the start.
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Octopi Commerce creates seamless solutions for our partners and their customers. Join us for a personalized demo of Reach CDP, our Connected Customer Data Platform. If giving us a call is more your style, dial 888.796.5755 for the scoop on what we offer and what we’ve been up to lately. Thanks!
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