Consumer services reviews are one of the most valuable assets for any service-based industry. Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer report shows that consumer trust in professional services is at 65%, placing it 9th out of 16 industries. In addition, reviews are ranked as the second-most popular source of information about products online.
With the help of powerful reputation management software, consumer service brands can leverage the reviews they get in their favor to accomplish long-term success goals: attracting and retaining customers, improving operations, and staying ahead of the competition.
Using Consumer Services Reviews to Better Attract and Retain Customers
Reviews are one of the first and most important steps during a consumer’s research into their next service purchase. In fact, 89% of consumers read reviews before making a purchase. This makes it crucial for your team to get your best reviews front and center in places where people are looking for brands similar to yours.
Attract Customers to Your Brand
Looking at a business directory list to find the best directories for your industry and utilizing local listing management software can easily get you started with online listings in places that your ideal consumers are already looking at for services. By doing so, you reduce the friction for the consumer making it easier for them to think of you as a viable choice for their next purchase.
Each of your listings should also have links to your brand website, which can feature testimonies from happy customers. For example, if you have a particular service package that you want people to be aware of, you can showcase reviews from customers who had a great experience with that offering. If you employ multiple staff that have close interactions to your customers, show reviews highlighting the rave-worthy experiences.
Generate Reviews for Better Online Visibility
In addition to review responses, your team needs to employ a strategy for asking for reviews for a variety of purposes. From a reputation standpoint, having more reviews, especially those that are recent, can help push the consumer to make a purchase decision. Statista data shows consumers between the age range of 18 and 44 expect an average of 167 reviews when looking at products online. In addition 44% of consumers say that they only look at reviews from within the past month to get a relevant picture of the experience. To meet those expectations, your team needs to be diligent and find ways to ask for feedback on a regular basis.
Getting more reviews can also help with local search. Reviews are a major factor in a brand’s search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, and generating feedback on a regular basis can help you rank higher on search queries. A constant feed of recent reviews on your listing can tell Google that people are visiting your stores on a regular basis, which can help you rank higher than your competitors and increases the chance of traffic both to your brand website and stores.
Resolve Issues and Engage with Customers
However, managing listings and showing off your best reviews are just the first steps to utilizing reviews to your advantage. For long-term success, your team also needs to gather and triage every piece of feedback to create a review response plan.
Taking time to adequately respond to both positive and negative feedback has multiple benefits. From a retention standpoint, it helps increase trust between you and the customer. Simply thanking the customer for coming in and mentioning a specific detail about their experience in your response shows that you highly value their feedback. A well-crafted response also serves as the foundation for better consumer engagement and even the creation of a loyal community. By noting reviews of repeat customers and responding to their feedback in a familiar tone, you make it clear that you know of their loyalty and great them as if they are a valuable part of the brand’s family.
Staying vigilant and proactive when it comes to responding to reviews is an easy, yet powerful customer retention strategy. Data from CallMiner shows that U.S. companies lost $136.8 billion in revenue because a consumer switched brands. Taking the time to listen to a customer’s feedback and responding accordingly isn’t just a way to help increase brand reputation and consumer trust, it becomes a valuable channel for retaining customers in the long run.
Using Consumer Services Reviews to Improve Operations
Another reason for more recent feedback is to help fuel internal changes. Specifically, your team should also look at trends across feedback to find new ways to better please current customers and meet expectations of future prospects. This might mean a change in staff procedures, overall operational habits, or even a shift in atmosphere in each store.
The process of manually combing through reviews from the last few days, weeks, or even months can take up plenty of time and human resources. By the time data is collected and reviewed in this manner, the small complaints seen in previous reviews can pile up to major issues that are negatively impacting operations and reputation. However, you can easily reduce review analysis time and human resources with the right technology.
Getting valuable data with customer experience analytics allows your team to detect various keyword trends and patterns across both positive and negative sentiments in a matter of minutes. You can see whether new initiatives, such as special packages or specific interactions, are working in your favor. This can give you more than enough information to decide whether to change tactics or stay the course. Along with all of this, the data gathered can provide actionable insights that you can use to satisfy existing customers while making necessary changes that will attract future consumers.
Using Consumer Services Reviews to Monitor Competitors
Monitoring feedback with reputation management software can also extend to your competitors and using customer experience analytics tools on your rivals’ reviews can reveal insights such as showing certain aspects of your competitor’s business as not pleasing to consumers or if some of their tactics are grabbing consumers away from your brand. By noticing specific keywords and trends in the reviews of your rivals, you can get a better picture of current consumer expectations.
Armed with valuable review data, you can make changes to the way you market to consumers in addition to current operations to please existing customers while creating marketing strategies that differentiate the brand from the competition. Rather than making estimates based on outdated reports or inaccurate trends, you can use the accurate and current review data that can lead to more impactful strategies that easily bring customers to your services.
Conclusion
A customer service brand that leans on online reviews can reap multiple benefits. Customer feedback can show your strengths and weaknesses, consumer expectations, and the strategies of major rivals. Feedback can reveal what consumers want from your services, and more importantly, what you can do to exceed expectations.
In short, reviews are a powerful tool to long-term success, and utilizing reputation management software elevates the way you use that customer feedback to steer your successful brand to new heights. Here is a simple checklist to ensure that your team uses every avenue when utilizing customer reviews and optimizing the company’s online reputation:
- Effectively manage local listings online
- Generate new reviews from customers
- Respond to all reviews
- Gather trends and valuable keywords from reviews to improve operations
- Monitor competitor performance through their reviews