Why Reputology?

How Valuable is 1 Star

You probably already know that reviews influence your customers. Otherwise, why else would you be reading this page when you could be relaxing with an orange mocha frappacino or other choice beverage? But you may have some team members who don’t quite understand the significance of reviews. So here are some hard numbers to get everyone on the same page:

A Harvard study on restaurants showed that a difference of 1 star can translate to 9% in sales .
Volkswagen conducted a study that showed its dealerships with average reviews of 4 stars and higher got 32% more traffic than those with 2 stars and below.
Research at The Hotel School at Cornell University showed that a hotel can raise its price by 11.2% without negatively affecting sales, if it’s rated 1 star higher.

The fact that independent studies in a variety of industries have reached similar conclusions is more than coincidence. The bottom line is that your reviews and online reputation impact revenue.

How to Remove Negative Reviews

But maybe you guys don’t need convincing that improving reviews is important. You’re wondering how you can get rid of those negative reviews from the ALL-CAPS-LOCK trolls. (As it turns out, you’re better off leaving them alone. Our MIT nerds have crunched the numbers, and they found a high correlation between interacting with those guys and self-inflicted wounds).

All joking aside, people who’ve mastered the lowercase keystroke write the vast majority of online reviews. In fact, most reviewers are reasonable about editing negative reviews and writing positive ones. These folks are worth engaging and listening to because they’re the ones who can make review sites powerful marketing channels and valuable sources of customer feedback for your business.

Responding to Reviews Makes a Difference

One of the most effective, organic ways for improving your ratings is by monitoring the review sites and responding to reviewers in a manner that is quick and professional. For negative reviews, responding gives your team the chance to get the reviewer to change, edit or delete their review in addition to winning them back as customers. For positive reviews, responding builds customer loyalty, increases the chance of repeat visits and demonstrates to prospective customers that you are listening.

In either case, engaging customers works in your favor:

“7 in 10 survey respondents indicated that a brand’s response to an online comment changes their perception of a brand, according to a study done by Bazaarvoice .”

Based on conversations we’ve had with businesses, we can confirm these findings. In fact, some Reputology customers have even gone on record to state that they can get 90% of their unhappy customers to change their mind .

Customer Comments Yield Actionable Insights

Although you might focus your attention on the crazies, their rants only represent a small fraction of what your customers have to say. Whether offline or online, most feedback is not extreme in nature and contains customer insights that can help make your business better.

For example, Caruso Affiliated - the real estate development company that operates The Grove and Americana - uncovered a new way to encourage holiday shopping.

Using data collected and analyzed by Reputology, the Caruso team saw that guest complaints about limited parking meant that the holiday shopping rush had put parking at a premium. To handle the overflow, the team developed a partnership with Uber, creating a code that guests could use to get a free Uber ride to and from the properties.

“When we notice an issue or a problem, we try to isolate it, and if we can't isolate it, we figure out a way to celebrate it—and that was our way to celebrate a problem,”
Vince Burneikis, Caruso Affiliated’s VP of learning, development and hospitality

(Download the rest of this case study or read other Reputology success stories here ).

Review Management at Scale

Your team can implement any of these winning strategies. But success is difficult to sustain unless review management is streamlined into a process that fits easily into your workflow. Simply put, it takes too much time and manpower to monitor, respond to, followup on, request, and analyze what customers are saying, everywhere, on an ongoing basis. And when you have multiple locations - perhaps hundreds or even thousands - managing reviews and feedback with any quality or rigor is impossible if not impractical at best.

That's why Reputology exists.

Reputology is the review management platform that helps multiple location businesses take control of their online reviews. Our technology solution helps you improve online reputation, make the customer experience better, and ultimately increase both the top line and bottom line.

Some of the best national, regional and local brands benefit from Reputology’s:

Customized Email Alerts so that your team can respond quickly.
Single Dashboard to monitor multiple local search directories for all your storefronts.
Workflow Tool to keep tabs on your team's response.
Analytics to track performance at the organization, regional and storefront level.
Competitive Benchmarking so that you see how your business stacks up.
Automated Feedback Collection to capture the voice of the customer and help inform decisions.