The Ripple Effect: How Optimizing Your POI's Reputation Benefits You

Today we will speak about how and why you should implement a review management strategy across your POI's.  Review management is the way you collect, treat, and analyze your customers’ online reviews. A decade ago, you may have called reviews free marketing. But today, reviews and ratings can serve an even bigger purpose: attract traffic, generate new sales, increase customer loyalty and boost brand awareness.

Let’s start off with some facts:

• Rating, quantity of reviews & response rate is in the top 3 criteria for listing ranking on Google
• 98% of consumers consult online reviews before making a purchasing decision
• 79% will not visit a business with a score lower than 3.5
• 53% of consumers expect a response to their negative reviews within a week.
• Google accounts for 73% of all reviews on the internet.

Your POI’s e-reputation can directly impact your own

With these data it’s a no brainer in that there is an opportunity for your brand to benefit from your POI’s managing their reviews efficiently. Remember that your POI’s reputation, can directly influence your own.

If you are a service provider like Deliveroo and your POI’s customer had an issue with delivery, they might leave a review on the restaurants GBP mentioning Deliveroo. If you are brand like Schwarzkopf and a customer loved the product used on their hair, your name can be mentioned on a hair salons review. So what are the steps to optimizing review management?

1. Centralize reviews

We know answering reviews can be time-consuming and tedious. Specially when there are multiple platforms to focus on. Businesses however have no choice but to adapt to users preferences.

This is why at PowerAPI, we have built an all-in-one platform to manage reviews across Google, Facebook and Tripadvisor, to decrease your POI’s time spent on admin, boost their local referencing and drive traffic to their website,  service provider app, or socials.

2. Select response templates

Review response personalization is a good thing, but again, can take up a lot of valuable time. For this you should equip your POI’s with a tool that allows them to select reply templates. Firstly POI’s can filter reviews by date, rating, platform, keywords, reviews treated or not treated, with or without comments and create appropriate templates.

These templates can be based on language response, rating received, or keywords found in the reviews. Remember SEO goes beyond just optimizing websites and blog articles, it’s time to teach your customers to include keywords in review responses.

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3. Educate on customer sentiment  

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We are all well aware that good customer service is not limited to face-to-face interactions. Looking into customer sentiment can help your POI’s make better decisions to improve or leverage a specific product or service. How can they do this? Simply put, through keyword analysis.

By analyzing online reviews, they can strengthen their customer relationships and ensure consistency across their brand and services. The great news is that the centralization of review data can provide 360-degree insight into what consumers think about products, competitors, and the market as a whole, data that is also interesting to a service provider.‍

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4. Use a review booster

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Consumers are generally inclined to leave a review when they feel on the extreme side of exceptional or disappointed. However, POI’s number of reviews weigh heavily on SEO. By offering a review boosting tool POI’s can be more effective and keep track of their efforts.  Boosting reviews can also help outweigh negative reviews and broaden the lexical field making their way to the first results on Google.

With PowerAPI businesses can activate  QR codes to place on tables and tickets, or insert the phone number of their customer and send a personalized message post purchase. Each time a POI receives a new review the POI will be notified.

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5. Track and analyze results

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What gets measured, gets managed, this is why it is highly important to keep track of how your e-reputation evolves over time. Consider statistics on the evolution of the number of reviews and average rating, response rate, and customer sentiment. Brands should also be able to analyze reviews or filter them by POI or keywords. By integrating the PowerAPI review management module you can get monthly performance reports.

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At the end of the day:

For brands and networks:

You might be ask yourself whether reviews should be replied from the head office or be left to the point of sale.

With PowerAPI you can find a compromise, because you can define the rights of your teams, can reply when necessary, and can correct reviews if necessary but still leave the day to day workload to the POI’s themselves.

If we go only for local response to reviews, we leave the chunk of work to business manager, what’s positive about this is that they are in direct contact with customers, and are therefore most likely to understand and reply to a review. It is also a good way to involve the staff and educate them on the importance of review management.  On the other hand with responses from the head office there is more reactivity as teams on the field often have operational challenges that take priority. Also, if you answer some strategic reviews as a brand, you are boosting your own SEO, and finally, you can make sure the content and tone are coherent so there is brand consistency.

For service providers & integrators:

Consumers are demanding, and review management is one of the portals to customer service. Service Providers have the opportunity to position themselves as reliable support for their customers.

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This strategic approach empowers Service Providers to gain a competitive advantage, boost their recurrent revenue, acquire new customers, foster long-term customer loyalty and create up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

If interested service providers can anonymize and aggregate data to provide industry benchmarks and reports,  or establish themselves as an authority in the field of online reputation management, sharing insights, best practices and though leadership content attracting attention from leads, media, and further boosting the service provider's reputation and visibility.

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Convinced?

If you’ve been convinced, and are considering integrating a white-label, review management module today; or still have some questions on how this can support your growth and your POI’s, book a free consultation with us today.

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