Finding a Problem With Your Online Business Reputation
At one point or another a business may find itself identifying at their online business reputation is in need of repair. There are many reasons why this may be noticed; a simple google search may identify problems, a client or other stakeholder may identify the company, or a company may simply find that their online or retail business is slowly dissipating and identify their business reputation as a cause for the problem. When this occurs there are several different steps that a business should undertake immediately to try to identify the problem and come up with a viable solution to the problem.
The first step should be fact finding. Identify the cause of the poor business reputation. Be sure to trace the problem back to its root cause and don’t just take a surface look at the problem. For example, a business may identify that the business reputation is the cause of poor online reviews. Some businesses will find ways to contract with the review site to remove these reviews or bury the negative reviews with a lot of more positive reviews. However, if this occurs other customers will eventually be just as disgruntled as the initial group of customers and more negative reviews will result. Find out what is making customers unhappy in the first place and try to solve those problems. Discuss with the clients who left the reviews the real problem and what would have changed the impression of the customer as to the customer’s business reputation. This step will often show those customers who left the negative review that you care about the business and their needs and looking for more positive interactions with customers.
Beyond this consider hiring a consultant to work on improving your overall business reputation. While you can take many of these steps yourself a professional reputation manager can provide their experience and expertise to help you to overcome your existing bad reputation. They often have contacts both at newspapers and other online sources including review websites that can help you to take different steps to improve your overall online reputation. Further, they have methods for monitoring your online business reputation so that both you and the business reputation management company can understand how your reputation is improving or not based on the steps that are being implemented. It is one thing to implement changes and another to understand if these changes actually had the intended impact that they were supposed to. Finally, an external business reputation management company can also provide unique solutions that can help your overall business improve its reputation.