XM Knowledge Base
Customer Experience
How to respond to reviews in 2022
As consumers, we all want to make wise purchasing decisions. So, how do we ensure we aren’t being ripped off? We study the customer reviews! Online ratings and reviews are a powerful engine that companies can use to build their brand, generate revenue, and boost customer loyalty.
How can your organization embrace customer reviews?
Build a Brand: When a business responds to reviews, it shows customers that the business cares. Survey data from Marketing Charts showed that 7 out of 10 customers changed their opinion about a brand after the company replied to a review.
Generate Revenue: The same Marketing Charts survey showed that companies responding to at least 25% of all reviews see 35% more revenue than those that reply less or not at all. According to Harvard Business Review, for every one-star increase that a business gets on Yelp, they see a 5 – 9% increase in revenue.
Boost Loyalty: People are hard-wired for communication. When we ask a question or provide a poor review about a product or service, 94% of consumers expect a brand to answer and respond to negative posts. 89% of customers read businesses’ responses to reviews, and if they don’t see a response from a brand, customer churn increases by 15%.
Related Article: 7 ways to improve online reviews
So, How Do We Respond Effectively to Reviews?
With dozens of review sites, how can a business keep up with and respond to feedback? Or when there’s a particularly thorny question or scathing review, how can customer service agents escalate to someone more experienced? To keep up with customer engagement on rating and review sites, companies are turning to digital customer service platforms, such as Clarabridge Engage, to aggregate feedback across review sites and efficiently manage responses. Through a central “Inbox”, agents can see and respond to incoming reviews posted on any monitored review site. They can escalate when needed and managers can track response metrics to ensure teams are on target. Clarabridge Engage also leverages best-in-class natural language understanding to automatically categorize review by topic, language, emotion, and more.
Responding to Reviews Supports Empathetic Customer Experiences
At the end of the day, responding to reviews shows customers that there is a human, caring presence behind the wall of code and text on a webpage. There is someone empathetic working behind the scenes — and that makes us feel seen and heard by the companies we choose to do business with.
In this age of social media and work from home, a positive emotional experience with a brand can be a major differentiator that helps you build your image in the marketplace. Digital Customer Service platforms, like Clarabridge Engage, ensure that you can build that image more effectively through organization-wide collaboration on the exact places where your customers look for answers. Harness the power of reviews with Clarabridge Engage.
Improve your reviews and drive customer loyalty with our free eBook