Day: January 29, 2021

Many consumers depend on reviews to guide their purchase decisions, but they may be running into fake reviews more often than they know. PC Magazine reports that an average of 39 percent of online reviews may have falsified information in them, with some business and product categories having particularly egregious numbers. Your business needs an action plan to address these reviews to avoid negative consequences.

The Impacts of Fake Reviews on Your Business

Fake reviews make it difficult for potential customers to know the truth about your products or services. Several of the ways that they create problems include:

• Providing inaccurate information: The reviewer may discuss details that have nothing to do with your offerings, or they could make up their experience.
• Setting incorrect expectations: New customers may expect something entirely outside of the scope of your business. They could end up choosing the wrong product or service for their needs.
• Decreasing consumer trust in real reviews for your business: Every fake review casts a shadow on the rest of your reviews. When you’ve spent a lot of time building up great reviews from your customers, this situation is frustrating.
• Driving customers to your competition: If the fake reviews lower your rating enough, or have lots of incorrect details, then your potential customers may look for other options. The lower rankings could also make it more difficult to appear in the search results of online review directories and similar websites.
• Damaging your company’s reputation: If enough people believe the fake reviews, your business could have a public relations crisis on your hands

Signs of Fake Reviews

So how do you tell which of your reviews are fake? You need to closely examine both the review and the profile of the person writing it for this process.

In the review, look for:

• A lack of detail
• Listing of specific factual information about your product, such as the feature list or measurements
• Limited anecdotal information about using your product or serviceSpelling and grammar issues
• Extreme opinions, either positive or negative
• Smaller in size than your average review

If you’re unsure whether a review is legitimate based on its text, dig deeper into the reviewer’s online information. Some directories have profiles that you can look at. Problematic attributes of reviews can include:

• Blank profiles
• Stock image photographs
• Generic names
• Completely new profiles
• Profiles with a single review

Some fake review indicators you can observe as trends across multiple reviews include:

• Identical phrasing in the review text from different reviewers
• Reviews published within a relatively short period

Why You Need to Address Fake Reviews Head On

You should respond to every review for your business, even those that are obviously fake. You can mitigate a significant amount of the damage that fake reviews cause when you make it clear that you read all feedback.

Your response gives you the opportunity to include accurate information about your product or service, set appropriate customer expectations for the experience, and show potential customers that you’re willing to address negative feedback.

If your actual customers have problems in the future, they trust that you’ll reach out to make things right. A professional and measured response to fake reviews also helps consumers know which reviews they should consider when they’re making purchase decisions.

How to Respond to Real and Fake Reviews in a Timely Manner

Responding to a handful of fake reviews per week is one thing, but what happens when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands? You end up in a rapidly unsustainable situation, and the longer fake reviews stay up without a response, the more damage they can do. Customers with legitimate issues also fall through the cracks, making them even more upset with your business.

Hiring additional staff to help with your reputation management is one option, but you can still easily end up with a workload that’s practically impossible to tackle manually. A reputation management platform like Retention360 is a technology-driven way to fix this problem at scale.

Instead of going to each online review source, you use Retention360 as a centralized platform. You’re better able to stay on top of what’s being said about you, and you can manage all of your reviews in one place. It’s designed as a one-on-one customer feedback platform, so you can deliver a personalized interaction for each review.

In addition to responding to fake reviews quickly, you can also collect, track, and analyze your customer feedback in real-time, filter feedback based on specific incidence, manage feedback for multiple locations, and offer diverse feedback options.

Don’t let fake reviews ruin the reputation you’ve spent so much time building. Get your policies and procedures in place to address this ever-growing problem, and ensure that you can handle it at scale with the right technology.

When consumer habits go digital, your customer retention strategy needs to follow suit. Retention360 is the solution.

We all know the pain of poor customer service. You feel like you’re unimportant, that your concerns aren’t being heard, and that you’re meant to hand over money and leave. Nobody wants to feel that way, and no reasonable business owner wants to make their customers feel that way. So, if there’s a decline in customer happiness, you want to do something about that. But where do you start?

Customer Retention Hurdles

First, let’s look at some ways that customer retention efforts go wrong.

General Surveys Give Vague Answers

The standard customer experience surveys at the end of receipts are too common for retailers. But not all concerns can be ranked on a 1-5 scale, or most to least satisfied. And comment fields at the end are often too short for customers to give any meaningful information. Vague questions beget vague responses.

What’s more, the communication that stems from a generic survey is often one-sided. Customers can voice their concerns, but your options for reaching out to respond are limited. Your customers deserve more than to have their complaints confined to your email inbox.

Not Enough Tech Overwhelms Staff And Customers

Have you ever felt like running a business gets in the way of running a business? If your business is growing and your staff comes running to you every time there’s a customer concern, you won’t have time to handle other business matters. This leads to a vicious cycle of unhappy customers and poor management.

Without a means to streamline the customer experience, your staff, your customers, and you will drown.

Heavy Tech Use Alienates Customers 

Imagine you have a problem. You ordered something online, and it hasn’t arrived. You haven’t received any updates. So, you write to the company, asking where your item is. But instead of your message reaching a human representative, it goes to an automated system that responds with outdated information and closes the ticket. You send another message with more information to clarify, and you’re given the same response from the same automated system.

With “digital transformation” as the growing buzzword in business, some business owners like to take the other extreme and automate everything. But poorly implemented automation is worse than no automation at all. This will have an alienating effect on your customers as it becomes increasingly difficult for them to reach out to a live human with concerns. 

The most sophisticated AI system won’t anticipate every customer complaint, especially when you’re trying to automate blindly. And at the end of the day, your customers want to know that there’s a human on the other end of the line taking their concerns into account.

Retention360 Benefits

Here’s how Retention360 handles the above issues to increase customer happiness and reduce customer churn.

Detailed Feedback For Issues

Go beyond the general survey and find out exactly why your customers are upset. Retention360 goes beyond the customer survey to gather more information from your customers. You tailor your feedback forms, with options for open text fields and photo and video additions. Customers will be able to give as much information as they need without being constrained by generic survey questions.

Direct Connection With Customers

The first step to creating an excellent customer experience is to make sure the customer feels seen and heard. Retention360 gives you multiple channels to reach out to customers, whether through the Retention360 program, email, phone call, or even a text. It’s a simple way to add a personalized touch to your customer retention strategy. Reach customers where they feel most comfortable communicating, and they will feel cared for.

Use Of Tech And Human Element

The best use of technology retains a bit of humanity. From remote work to telehealth to grocery delivery, more industries have embraced this truth in recent years. Maintaining customer happiness is a personalized pursuit by default, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. Retention360 makes use of AI elements like sentiment analysis and machine learning to improve your responses to customer concerns.

Learn More About Retention360

Retention360 has the tools to help you achieve customer success and increase ROI. Contact us today for more information.