There are now multiple academic studies that show the significant affect of consumer reviews on businesses. Whether it is a guest at a hotel, a patron at a restaurant or a consumer buying a product online, reviews play an influential role in the success of brands, products and services. What are businesses able to do to manage these reviews, address customer comments and subsequently adapt their business accordingly?
Capsolve explored 14 products and services within the category of Social Analytics that provide various solutions for managing Ratings and Reviews. Implementing these solutions for your business either yourself or with the assistance of resources such as a consultant, marketing agency or public relations firm is usually straight forward, reasonably priced and a worthwhile investment.
The most important initial question for businesses is how to find the relevant technologies for their specific needs. Note that many products are addressing this opportunity for local businesses such as hotels and restaurants, while others are specialized toward the needs of consumer brands and products. Furthermore, a few of these solutions are designed to meet the needs of multiple types of clientele, should your assigned corporate responsibilities encompass multiple segments. Beyond the type of client for which the solution is best suited, a buyer needs to understand the features and capabilities provided by the various technologies to align it directly with their strategies and goals.
All of these solutions provide rating and review analysis to various depths and many offer notification or alerting, typically with respect to informing a user of new reviews each time a consumer creates a review on a covered website. Further definitions are:
- Reputation Management: enables a business to react to online content, such as reviews, that may negatively affect their performance
- Review Lift: facilitates an improvement in the number of reviews for a business, with a goal toward generating positive reviews
- Customer Service & Support: provides a capability to find and respond to customer service issues originating from online sites, such as review sites or social media
- Review Syndication: distributes reviews, such as those originating from a company’s own website, to a network of marketing and ecommerce sites
- Embedded Solutions: allows the publishing of reviews or review related content on a company’s own website
Why is this important? The aforementioned studies show a direct cause and effect relationship that starts with additional positive reviews, progresses toward improved positioning within ecommerce sites and ends with increased revenues. This requires that your chosen solution activates these steps and the corresponding result.
There are many additional key considerations that may be relevant to you depending on your type of business and marketing objectives. For instance, this research identifies whether the technology enables a business to moderate review content and control if the content is published on their own website. Selected solutions provide features for Agencies to manage an implementation on behalf of multiple clients. Similarly, a brand may have multiple locations and need to analyze their individual or aggregate performance by country, region, sales territory or a configurable group.
It is important to note the uniqueness of each product and service researched as it is this quality that plays an important role in defining the best solution match for your project objectives. The criteria listed above and the other features and capabilities found within these solutions is primarily defined to eliminate the time you need to research, identify and connect with the products and services most relevant to you.
Contact us to learn more about these Ratings and Review Solutions and receive a free list of solution providers.