Like it or not, your brand reputation is king when it comes to marketing and sales. And there are various reasons for brand reputation damage. Those include poor customer support, failing to live up to your brand image, bad reviews from employees, poor website experience, and bad customer reviews.
A survey revealed that 93% of customers read and get influenced by reviews. Worse, four out of five consumers don’t buy brands with bad reputations. Companies can, however, do something about the situation. We named six ways you can protect your brand reputation here.
Step #1: Automate Customer Support
The most common reason customers cite for giving brands a bad review is that they don’t provide good customer support. Poor customer support can be due to a lack of means to give feedback on what your consumers’ experiences with your brands were like. Employing email software that automatically sends customers messages asking them for product reviews is a popular way to address this issue.
Another reason why you’d get a bad customer support review is making consumers wait too long when they call your hotline. That problem is solvable with the use of automatic replies and chatbots. The latter, in particular, can help answer common queries in place of a live company representative. Frequently asked question (FAQ) pages on your website can alleviate the issue as well.
Step #2: Hear What Customers Have to Say on Social Media
Widespread social media usage is both a boon and a bane to all companies. Anyone can say either good or bad things about the products and services they use. Good reviews translate to greater profit and bad ones, unfortunately, to revenue loss.
Businesses can use social media listening tools to track tweets, posts, and comments that mention their brand or company names. These solutions include HubSpot, MentionMapp, and Hootsuite. With their help, you can determine how consumers see your brand.
Step #3: Set Up Online Alerts
Apart from social media, news sites, online publications, and blogs are also venues for customers to post either raves or grievances about your products.
Linking back to sites with good reviews can benefit your blog if you have one. Negative feedback, meanwhile, can give you ideas on how you can improve your products and, therefore, revenue. And you can track all brand mentions, good and bad alike, by simply setting up Google Alerts.
Step #4: Run Brand Perception Surveys
Shooting blind is no way to run a business. All companies thus painstakingly make it a point to integrate online surveys into their planning process. That ensures they get insights into how their branding efforts from the previous year performed. They can then answer questions like:
- Did our target markets like our products?
- Which efforts translated into revenue?
- Which efforts didn’t work and shouldn’t be part of strategies for the upcoming year?
You can find brand perception survey templates online and customize them to fit your needs. Send forms customers can easily fill up online, process their feedback, and make them part of your plans.
Step #5: Know Your Partners and Suppliers Well
All is well if all of your partners’ and suppliers’ brands remain squeaky clean. But should they end up as victims of a data breach or other kinds of cyber attacks, it’s very likely for your good name to get dragged in the mud as well.
Using supply chain or third-party risk monitoring tools can help avoid such risks. If the network of any of your suppliers or partners gets compromised, your company information can end up in the cyber attackers’ hands as well. And if your customers get wind of the incident, you could end up losing them.
Stay abreast of cybersecurity news. Assess all third parties before granting them access to your network and data. Lax security on their part could just as easily affect your infrastructure’s security and integrity.
Step #6: Watch Out for Cybersquatters, Phishers, and Brand Impersonators
Domain brand monitoring should be part of every business’s brand protection efforts. Apart from monitoring brand mentions throughout the Web, you need to track domains and subdomains that contain your brand name. By doing that, you can catch potential cybersquatters, phishers, and brand impersonators, ensuring that your brand reputation remains intact no matter what.
Cyber attackers can use look-alike domains and subdomains to prey on your customers and third-party partners and suppliers. Some could use cybersquatting domains to sell counterfeit versions of your products. And should they fall short of customer expectations, your brand will suffer. Phishers could create fake login pages sporting your logo and company name and use these to steal from your customers.
Protecting your brand reputation is a must for success. That would require providing good customer service to avoid bad reviews. Using automated email replies and chatbots can help with that. Brand reputation protection also stems from knowing your customers’ thoughts. You can get a feel for those through social media listening, setting up online alerts, and running perception surveys every now and then. Taking great care not to liaise with untrustworthy third parties to prevent risks would also do the trick. Finally, advanced tools meant specifically for brand reputation protection can help with avoiding dealings with phishers, cybersquatters, and brand impersonators.
Only by maintaining a healthy brand reputation can you manage consumer perception, which significantly affects the sale of your products. The six steps to protect your brand reputation mentioned above can help you avoid poor customer support, failing to live up to your brand image, bad reviews from employees and customers, and poor website experience.
Laila Azzahra is a professional writer and blogger that loves to write about technology, business, entertainment, science, and health.