4 Tips to Manage Your Online Reputation

BOSTON -- Retailers should think of people visiting their website or social-media pages the same way they think of customers stepping into their stores.

Customers Googling a store are online to shop for a brick-and-mortar shopping experience, previewing the store before they physically enter. They will inevitably see reviews of the store and these reviews are likely to affect their decisions.

Retailers have much to gain from favorable online ratings and much to lose with negative ratings. As such, it’s important to keep track of online reviews and to make an effort to keep reviews positive. Boston-based GasBuddy recently released a report with tips on how retailers can manage their online reputation.

Here are four points from the report to help retailers gain and retain good online reviews …

GasBuddy suggests retailers designate an employee to track, respond to and manage online customer reviews. Answering online reviews and addressing the problems they point out is important for a store’s image and performance, so it’s smart to designate a person or team to stay on top of online reviews.

The report suggests assigning this task to the team or employee responsible for answering the phone, email communications or the store’s social-media presence to maintain a consistent message. If stores don’t have the manpower to assign a person or team to this task, there are online services that will automatically respond to online feedback.

It can be easy for retailers faced with a bad online review to ignore it. After all, nothing good will come from engaging an angry internet user, right? Wrong.

Retailers should publicly respond to every online review, good or bad, even if it’s responding to a complaint with something as simple as “thank you for your valuable feedback. Please direct message us with more details so we can prevent this from happening in the future.”

In a recent survey of its users, GasBuddy found that a personal response to a review would influence their decision to return, and 72% of consumers would consider revisiting a station or store if their complaints were resolved quickly. If a formerly disgruntled customer is satisfied with the response to their complaint, they could even be convinced to give the store a better online rating.

It’s important for retailers to keep track of online customer reviews of their stores. The report said that 69% of survey respondents would not visit a station if it has fewer than three stars on GasBuddy’s app, so staying on top of an online rating is a must to continue attracting customers.

Depending on the size of the chain, sometimes it’s impossible for owners to personally track the online reputation of every single store. In these cases, it’s important to have location managers who can take charge of monitoring their store’s online reputation.

Location managers should keep the business information of their stores up to date online. Business can be lost if store information is missing on review websites. For example, a customer looking for a car wash might search for one on Yelp, and if a store near them doesn’t bother mentioning that they have a car wash on that site, that customer will pass the store by for another car wash they found searching online.