Reputation Management
Reputation Management is about ensuring your customers see the best of your products or services, not the worst.
When you are selling a product or service you will know that your customers will likely have been told about you by a friend. We do it all the time, we have a great experience with a brand and so we tell our friends. We don't need to cover the old saying that a happy customer tells 5 people about why they are happy whereas an unhappy customer tells 12. We don't need to cover that because those days are gone. Now, thanks to Facebook, Twitter and the web as a whole it is estimated that an average unhappy customer tells over 2000 people to steer clear of you!
So, how do we combat this? Well, firstly, if your customers have something bad to say about your products or services or about you as a company then the first thing we advise is... fix the issue. The best form of reputation management is to ensure you only have a positive reputation. Of course this isn't reality, it is a nice thing to think possible but somewhere, sometime, someone will be unhappy with you.
What the internet has done is given people a voice and a soapbox from which to shout from. You might have 1000 happy customers for every 1 unhappy one, however, those 1000 happy ones will be less interested in telling people how good you are. So, you need to address the balance to reflect the reality, that most of your customers are happy, that what you offer is good.
We use the same channels that your customers do to create a positive buzz about your products. We talk about your brand or your products on Facebook and Twitter, we post reviews and experiences on leading review sites.
But is Reputation Management immoral?
NO! We never make anything up. We use real reviews from real customers, either those that have posted online already or those that have completed a survey or questionnaire with you. We take real life thoughts and comments and promote them to ensure they are seen above and beyond and negative ones. After all, these happy people deserve a voice, they are just less often inclined to use it.
We work with you to get to the bottom of bad reviews and we counteract them by finding reviews of happy customers and making these more visible. lets use the example of a telecoms client... They have a bad reputation for using Indian callcentres with long waiting times. The reality is that only one of their 12 inbound customer support lines (Technical Support, Sales, Accounts etc) is based in India, the rest are in the UK and targeted at answering in just five rings.
Someone started a thread on their poor service on a large telecoms related forum and this was followed up by two other contributors. As is the nature of the web, this content found itself "scraped" onto other sites and before you now it these comments were on Page 1 of Google's results page when searching for the brand! This in turn led to new potential customers seeing the feedback and buyig elsewhere, even adding to the problem by saying, "Just seen all the bad reviews of Brand X, I went to Brand Y instead". You can see how this costs companies billions of pounds every year.
So, we worked to adjust the perception. We struck right at the core and posted comments from happy people who had submited post call-in surveys. We said how the UK based callcentres were quick to answer and deal with calls, how well they understood the issues and also threw in comments on the excellent price of the services. Don't forget, everything we were saying was true, it's just that the happy customer who said it has no motivation to post in online himself making it all very one-sided against the poor company.
Over the course of a few months the existing comment threads on the main forums had been turned around (actually looking very credible as a result) and this positive messaging was filtering across onto other sites. We stepped in again to keep the momentum up by tweeting and Facebooking comments to draw attention to the positive reviews and sure enough confidence in the company returned. Now searching for this brand potential customers see good news which in reality reflects how more than 96% of their customers actually felt.
So, take control of your reputation and allow us to boost your credibility. Why not contact us so that we can put together a proposal for you.
“ Webfaced have always been a central part of our eCommerce strategy. They understand the nuances of our business and the demands of the e-tail world and they help us to bring the two together. ”
