Simple Steps to Protect Your Corporate Reputation

managing-your-corporate-reputationWhether your company does business locally or internationally, Managing Your Corporate Reputation is critical.  Here’s why:

It’s quite likely that your company has been reviewed online by customers that have received service from you. It is one of the subtle differences that the online world has brought to doing business. While on the one hand, it’s easier to reach new customers with your message; it’s also very easy for those customers to tell others about their experience with your business.

That means that you’ll need to take great care in understanding the review process that customers can engage in about your business. Do you know where your company is being reviewed? When was the last time you went to the Internet and searched for your business to find out what customers were saying about how you deliver the product or service that they purchased? If you haven’t done this for a long time, it’s advisable that you do so on a regular basis.

The reason is simple, consumers are coming to instinctively trust this review process before they make a decision about what purchase to make. That means that the business could be missing the opportunity to meet customers for the first time, if a review that customers see on line is turning them away.

This new way of managing the review process online, is popularly called reputation management. It basically means that what customers say about you publicly is becoming more important than what you say about yourself in your sales message.

If you’re spending a considerable amount of time and resources in getting your message across to your customer, you want to divert some of that same energy to making sure that there are positive reviews to be found when they (customers) begin to research their options.

This involves first understanding where companies like yours are being reviewed. Customers often make the decision to buy from those with whom they feel are the most trustworthy. So you’ll want to do everything that you can to make sure that you appear in those places where companies like yours are being reviewed with a positive reputation.

The second step involves helping those customers that have positive experiences to undertake the review process. You’ll want to make sure that you have a system in place, so that each purchase leads to the customer’s subsequent action to reach out and talk about their experience. What this will do is to ensure that your reputation is visible where ever a consumer might look.

Invariably, there will always be some customer experiences that don’t go the way you want them to go. When you find out about these experiences through the online review process, you want to take action to answer this complaints publicly whenever possible. This demonstrates to those researching companies like yours that you are conscientious, and that your customer’s experience truly matters to you. Contact us today to find out more about how to use this entire process to generate more sales and leads.

photo credit: y0mbo cc

Boyd Bowker