How important is it for companies to manage their online reputation?
Anthony Gaskell: In today’s digital marketplace, managing a company’s online reputation is essential. The information that appears about businesses online is what stands between all of their marketing efforts and increased revenue. Customer reviews influence consumer choice.
With these personal investments, potential guests will conduct research on the internet before deciding on a hotel. As a result, the sentiment of customer reviews impacts the online marketing of any business.
Marketing teams consistently drive traffic to a business’s online profiles, but if the majority of reviews are negative and companies do not respond, that time and investment could go to waste.
Online reviews are important, but what else can a hotel do to boost its image?
Online reputation is built on more than customer reviews. For example, businesses these days can encounter challenges keeping all of their listings information accurate across the various services consumers use. The accuracy of business listings matters more in the hospitality industry than in most others.
Moreover, a hotel’s online reputation also includes managing social channels, from the obvious advertising and content publishing to interacting with consumers. This channel could be the preferred way of communication for some of these customers, and thus needs to be managed at all times. Advanced technology, like text analytics, can help improve company performance without manual input.
Hotels have led the online reputation management (ORM) space, but what more can they do?
Hotels have been listening to guests’ feedback for years and have made ORM central to their marketing strategy. If you look across sectors, hospitality has definitely led in ORM adaptation, but there is space for improvement. With a lot of this feedback being public, a way to stay ahead in this space would be to compare your ORM results against that of your competitors.
What is working for them and how could this be adapted for your business? Finding that competitive advantage in guests’ testimonials is valuable insight to help them plan for the future and stay ahead of the competition.
Could you give a specific example of the work Reputation.com has done with clients in the hospitality industry?
Mitchells & Butlers have been working successfully with Reputation.com for almost two years. Early on, this leading hospitality group recognised the need to implement a technology to be able to stay on top of the growing amount of online reviews.
It is working with Reputation.com to gather all thirdparty reviews into one platform. It can manage social media more efficiently by disseminating content and assets across the organisation.
The result is that managers now reply to over 80% of all customer reviews. All this lets the organisation make continuous improvements to customer service and stay ahead of the competition.
How is Reputation.com planning to improve its services?
The Reputation.com platform benefits greatly from a dedicated team, working hard to improve the service. For example, a new ticket management module helps manage feedback case by case, integrating with CRM and PMS. The company also plans to improve its mobile app.
Staff engagement is important to customers, and having them locally managing their online reputation is made easy with the use of Reputation.com’s applications. At the same time, a revamped social suite allows large organisations to disseminate relevant contents to multiple social profiles.
Finally, the company has have invested heavily in ‘social listening’. Being able to react in real time to social conversations is the future of CX, as is marketing. Reputation.com’s vision is to provide everything to a hotel to take control of its online reputation.
