Did you know that 90% of customers will avoid purchasing from a company due to a bad reputation? Companies can owe as much as 63% of their value to reputation alone.
That’s right—brand reputation can make or break your home services business.
Your business reputation is a powerful yet vulnerable asset. As such, you want to mold, nurture, and protect it.
However, protecting brand reputation is increasingly challenging in the digital age. The modern world is highly interconnected. A single bad review or viral social media post can sink your business. Even tracking customer feedback is a tall order.
That’s where reputation management software comes in.
This article explains why your home services business needs this software. We’ll review some of the risks and challenges of managing your business reputation manually. Then, you’ll see how reputation management software helps mitigate them.
RELATED ARTICLE: What Is the Customer Journey? (And How Can Home Services Providers Make It Better?)
Challenges of Managing Reputation Manually
What is reputation management in the first place?
Reputation management is all about influencing what people think of your business. The main goal is to shed a positive light on your brand.
So, how do you manage your home services reputation?
Reputation management is an ever-evolving process with three core elements:
- Maintaining a positive brand image
- Managing operation and performance
- Controlling what the business says or shows about itself
Sounds simple enough, right?
Well, managing business reputation is often easier said than done.
Building and protecting a strong brand reputation is a ton of work. First, you must deal with the never-ending stream of customer feedback. Second, you need to find opportunities to boost your brand’s reputation.
Manual reputation management can be overwhelming. Besides, you can only do so much with pen and paper and a limited staff.
You’ll likely encounter these challenges when attempting to manage your home services reputation manually:
Huge Workloads
Among other tasks, reputation management involves:
- Responding to customer feedback
- Addressing misinformation and bad press
- Encouraging customer interactions
- Monitoring brand mentions
- Cultivating customer relationships
- Auditing your reputation
That’s quite the workload for any home services provider.
Take managing customer feedback, for example. Suppose you had four social media accounts, a website, and a Google Business Profile. The thought of reading and responding to all that feedback sounds like a headache. And this is just one facet of the job.
Managing business reputation manually is painstakingly tedious and time-consuming. Even with a dedicated employee doing all the work, it can still be overwhelming.
Missed Feedback
It’s vital for service-based businesses to respond to customer feedback. In a recent survey, 88% of customers said they’d use a business that responds to all its reviews.
Responding consistently builds trust and credibility. It also gives you opportunities to correct misinformation and reassure upset customers. A thoughtful response can turn a bad review into a positive interaction.
But to respond to reviews, you first have to find them. That’s a big problem when managing your reputation manually. It’s easy to miss important customer feedback when sifting through them by hand.
Poor Response Time
Thanks to the internet, information travels at the speed of light. That, too, is how quickly your reputation can shift. In the fast-paced digital world, reputation management requires a proactive approach.
For example, there’s no telling how far a bad review can go. You never know what it can evolve into or how much damage it can cause. It’s best to put out fires before they start.
However, reacting promptly when doing things manually can be difficult or even impossible. And that, obviously, doesn’t sit well with customers. Slow reactions will make it seem as if you’re ignoring feedback.
Managing reputation manually is a slow process. It takes time to go through each customer data point. And that’s time you often cannot spare.
Low Visibility Into Your Business Reputation
Auditing your reputation is a big part of reputation management. You need to know how customers perceive your business. What do they like (or hate) about your home services, and why?
Answering those questions helps you fine-tune your reputation.
For instance, analyzing reviews gives you valuable insights into customer expectations. You can then adjust your home services to boost customer satisfaction. In the process, you’ll be improving your overall reputation, too.
Sadly, it’s difficult to get a clear picture of your business reputation using manual methods.
It would take a lot of number-crunching to even quantify customer feedback. And that’s only one of the simplest measures of reputation performance. How would you analyze sentiment, reach, or other more intricate metrics?
What Is Reputation Management Software?
Reputation management software helps businesses monitor and manage their reputation quickly and efficiently. It digitizes, automates, and simplifies many of the tedious required tasks.
This type of software is also called an online reputation manager (ORM).
Most ORMs are highly integrated, hosted solutions. They work by collecting, analyzing, and presenting data from various customer touchpoints.
So, what exactly can reputation management software do? Quite a lot, actually, including:
- Sync and organize data from multiple sources (conversations, comments, mentions, and reviews)
- Automatically detect sentiment in feedback
- Alert you to any potential risks from negative conversations or feedback
- Deliver actionable insights into customer engagement and behavior
- Track and monitor reputation performance
To do all this, reputation management software employs cutting-edge technologies. Some even feature AI-powered tools to analyze customer interactions and experiences.
So, no more manual processes. Imagine managing all aspects of your reputation on a single pane of glass. And that’s not all. You’ll do so with a computer’s accuracy, efficiency, and thoroughness.
FROM ONE OF OUR PARTNERS: 5 Customer Retention Tactics to Try
Why Your Home Service Business Needs Reputation Management Software
You might think your home services business is too small to use an ORM. But you’d be mistaken. Businesses of any size can benefit from using reputation management software.
Here’s what this software can do for your business:
Save Time and Money
Managing your reputation manually is a misuse of valuable time.
Just imagine how long it would take to gather, sort, and organize customer feedback. Managing reviews alone would be a full-time job.
Reputation management software is much more efficient. It can gather, organize, and rank data from multiple channels in real-time. Tasks that take hours of hard work are dealt with in seconds.
The speed and efficiency of reputation management software can save time and money. It also frees you to focus on running and growing your business.
Enable Proactive Crisis Management
We’ll say it again—reputation management requires a proactive approach. By using ORM, you can quickly identify potential issues. You can then address them before they become big problems.
For example, the software analyzes sentiment in reviews, comments, and feedback as they’re posted. That way, you can quickly address angry customers or cases of misinformation.
Quick reactions enable you to resolve minor issues before they escalate into crises.
Some systems will even alert you to anything that requires high priority. You could receive notifications every time someone complains about your home services business.
FROM ONE OF OUR PARTNERS: 3 Ways to Turn One-Time Customers Into Lifetime Customers
Streamline Reputation Monitoring
Monitoring your reputation requires you to gather information from every customer touchpoint. These may include your home services website and social media channels. That’s before you start on third-party sources such as forums, review sites, and listings.
On top of that, reputation monitoring is a never-ending process.
And you can’t skip monitoring your reputation. How else would you know how people perceive your home services business?
Using a digital solution makes it so much easier. First, the whole process can be automated. Second, you get historical and real-time visibility into your reputation performance.
Improve Customer Engagement
An ORM creates new opportunities to engage with customers. The software helps you understand what customers think about your brand. Use that understanding to tweak your messaging to connect with customers more deeply.
Remember, any opportunity to engage with customers is good for business. It’s a chance to boost your reputation.
RELATED ARTICLE: Why Home Services Providers Need to Create Customer Engagement
Provide Data-Driven Insights
We saved the best for last. Data is perhaps the most important benefit of an online reputation manager.
Digital tools for reputation management analyze vast volumes of data. This analysis yields valuable insights that inform decision-making. You’ll even learn about your business’s overall performance.
For instance, the software can help you identify customer pain points. Let’s say one of the pain points is the high prices of your home services. Some financial adjustments here and there can quickly solve the problem.
Additionally, data-driven insights paint a clear picture of your brand’s reputation. An insightful view of your reputation shows you what works and what needs improvement.
How You Can Start Choosing a Reputation Management Software Right Now
You can see why a busy home services business would need a dedicated reputation manager. Let reputation management software fill that position. You can start selecting a fitting solution today by following these steps.
- Assess your business needs. What does your home services business need from reputation management software?
- List your feature requirements. List all the essential features you need from reputation management software. Put reputation monitoring, reporting, and sentiment analysis at the top of your list.
- Shop around. See what’s out there. Look for a solution matching your needs and budget.
- Schedule demos. Request trial demos from multiple software vendors. Test the software’s ease of use, functionality, and performance before purchasing. A demo also tells you if a particular solution would be a good fit for your business.
- Choose wisely. Look beyond the software’s features and functionality. Assess its scalability, flexibility, support, and ROI.