As we said in our previous blog post, your business reputation is incredibly important and online reviews of your products and services can make or break your business.

That’s why you need a strategy for getting more reviews from your customers and ways to use these to display your excellence. Don’t assume your clients will remember to review you without you offering them some gentle reminders – you can do just this with Ratings & Review Optimisation.

Read on to find out how you can use this tool to get more reviews, gain more visibility for your business online and improve on your customer experience.

Why online reviews matter

These days, most people check online reviews before purchase and it’s easy to see why.

When looking up what other people have thought about a restaurant, IT company or a new mobile phone can be done in just a few clicks, it would be silly not to see if other people have enjoyed the product or service you’re considering.

And these opinions really do matter: it takes an average of twelve positive reviews to offset a single negative one.

So getting a good number of genuine, helpful reviews – especially positive ones – is integral to your company reputation.

How Ratings & Review Optimisation can boost your online reputation

Our recommended tool for getting more customer reviews and improving your company reputation online is Ratings & Review Optimisation.

This is a tool that allows you to send automated emails to your clients to ask for a review or so that you can showcase your expertise online and quickly address any issues your customers are facing.

You can showcase your reviews on your R&R Optimisation profile, your own website as well as third-party sites like Google My Business, Facebook and Yelp.

When your customers go to leave you a review with R&R Optimisation and their rating is above a threshold you’ve set, they get the option of posting their review on a third-party review site as well as your Ratings & Review Optimisation profile.

This allows you to get greater benefits from a single review.

SEO

R&R Optimisation reviews also get ranked by all major search engines and in this way, they’ll also improve your SEO.

In practice, this means that when people search for the kind of products or services you offer, your website will feature higher in their search results, likely with a snippet of text from a positive review left by an existing customer.

Apart from online reviews, you can use Ratings & Review Optimisation to send out regular customer surveys.

This allows you to gain more insight into how individual employees are doing, what unique needs your customers have and how your company can help them solve their problems.

How to get started with Ratings & Review Optimisation

After signing up and claiming your business for free, you can import the contact details of your customers and send them a simple email survey so they can share how they think you’re doing.

You’ll be able to customise the headline and copy of the email as well as the primary question you want your customers to answer. You can send up to three emails after purchase to a customer thanking them and asking them for a review.

When they click to give you a score on your primary question, they’ll be given the option to expand on their views by writing a review.

You can also set up to five additional questions they can answer to get more detail on where you’re excelling and where you still have room for improvement.

After a customer has left a review, you’ll have a chance to look over it and choose whether or not you want to display it on your profile. You might be tempted to publish only positive reviews, but we wouldn’t recommend doing this.

A variety of ratings gives your company more legitimacy and if you simply delete negative reviews, the customers who left them will feel even more let down by your unwillingness to address issues.

Instead of deleting bad reviews, you should view them as an opportunity to do better. Respond quickly and thank them for taking the time to share their opinion.

Then, do your best to make it right – any freebies you can offer here go a long way. Share with them the steps you’ll take to make sure this won’t happen again – this way, you just might win a client for life!

The next steps

If you need help getting started with Ratings & Review Optimisation or would like more information on how it could benefit your IT strategy, get in touch with us at Jera.

To read more about why your business reputation matters, check out our previous blog post on this topic.

While you’re at it, why not read some of our other business blog posts? Have a look at our events page for details for a chance to meet us in person.