Company owners who use an online reputation monitoring service are ahead of the curve in understanding how invaluable one’s reputation is to entrenching long-term growth. The more positive your reputation appears, the higher the customer values your company. Since over 90% of online shoppers check out customer reviews before deciding to purchase, a higher valued company can afford to charge their product or service at a premium. A positive reputation also brings credibility and trustworthiness to your brand, where your stock if you’re an IPO will reap major benefits through high price-earnings multiples and lower costs of capital. The majority at a whopping 70% to 80% of market value is assessed by intangible factors such as goodwill, brand equity and intellectual capital. Where most companies falter is that they merely attempt to manage their reputation only when a rotten result appears.
This is not considered reputation management but instead it is a little something that we call crisis management. The truth of the matter is that you must take cautious steps to protecting your reputation from risk. Let’s discuss the main determinant of this, which happens to be the famous reputation-reality gap. You’re probably already aware of the gap that can occur in industry’s such as hospitality when satisfaction and expectations are not met. Say you purchased a hotel room for the night and read positive customer reviews and view sublime photos of a rustic villa. When you show up, the photos skipped over the dump that the place truly resembles.
The walls are barely holding on with the stench of mold that has formed in your private hotel villa. Ants are crawling across the floor and your bed sheets are old and itchy. You even check for bed bugs, only to realize that nope—thankfully no bed bugs (you dodged a bullet there) but instead you find a spider’s nest. These are the type of things that will make you unduly want to write a bad review as a warning to other potential guests. As the hotel, you should have seen this coming. You shouldn’t have deleted all the bad reviews that you know previously existed on your site but instead you should have mitigated the problem with hotel renovations. This goes to say that you as a company should be using an online reputation monitoring service to prevent the risk of your company from potholing if you slam into a few bad reviews. Have enough foresight to dealing with these issues through consistent monitoring and you will certainly sleep better at night. Don’t let your online reputation keep you up, let an online reputation monitoring service relieve you of your worries!
