Reputation Management 101: How Reviews Can Make or Break Your Business

Reputation has, is, and will always been important for individuals and organizations alike. Rather than outright purchasing goods and services, consumers often carry out extensive reviews on businesses. They often ask friends, family, and peers what they think of businesses being considered. Consumers might check with the Better Business Bureau to check the legitimacy of organizations. Prospective customers might also look online for reviews posted by others online, something a whopping 81 percent of consumers do before they make any purchases. As such, maintaining good reputation on product, service, and business reviews is important for drawing in new customers and not shooing away existing ones. Let's look a little further into how reviews can make or break your business.

Online Reviews are Often Trusted

Numbers vary, but more than 80 percent of consumers feel online reviews are as trustworthy as options solicited from friends, family, and peers. As such, online reviews' importance should never underestimated, because so many people take them for fact and actuality.

People Tend to Comment on Experiences When Bad

Research indicates that 95 percent of customers who have left reviews online in the past do so when faced with negative experiences at businesses. Conversely, 87 percent of those consumers with positive experiences share their stories online. Now, many businesses -- really, all businesses -- won't have 9 out of 10 customers posting reviews online, but this research indicates that bad experiences are shared more likely than good ones.

Replies to Reviews May Remediate Problems

Many platforms that host reviews on businesses facilitate those organizations being able to reply back to reviewers. One study found that 71 percent of those who left bad reviews online did so because of subpar customer service. By better interacting with customers, businesses are likely to prevent a good chunk of negative reviews. Replying to bad reviews is providing customer service, giving seven out of ten complainants what they wanted in the first place. Not only that, readers who notice reviews with appropriate responses may feel better about businesses being researched.

Listening to Reviews

While reviews can certainly alter the likelihood readers' visiting or otherwise engaging with your business, they can also directly change businesses. Organizations who actively browse customer reviews and take them for fact can inform employees of how they can improve, modify business functions, and improve offerings to prevent problems from happening again. Combing through tens of reviews is time-consuming, and it's often difficult to find everywhere on the Internet that hosts reviews. As such, using a customer experience optimization platform like OpenTell proves beneficial to companies that use them.

Existence of Multiple Reviews

Taking multiple sources into consideration is something everyone does -- or at least should do -- when learning, writing, preparing presentations, and searching for product and service providers. While people can find hundreds of sources on social media sites' offerings, the anatomy of humans, and news reports on current events, there aren't always reviews of businesses online. If only one review is available online, it may not prove beneficial -- or detrimental, if it's a bad review -- to companies. A 2011 survey indicated that 85 percent of respondents would more likely purchase goods and services if it were possible to locate multiple reviews.

Many consumers log online to various sites for reviewing the validity, skill, and customer service of businesses. Even existing customers with several visits to particular businesses under their belts will check reviews, whose opinion may be changed if they read recent, negative reviews. Regardless of what field your business serves, online reviews are undoubtedly important for business performance.