Customer Experience, or CX, is a necessary consideration for every company. Your customers’ experience when they deal with your company is an important determinant of whether they will be one-time or loyal customers. At the same time, CX also decides whether these customers will recommend your company to other people, generating favourable word-of-mouth. The quality of your internal mechanisms, how good your agents are, your response time, and various other factors decide whether you are ranked high or low for CX. This, in turn, impacts your sales.
Online Reputation Management, or ORM, is considered an important subsection of CX. Among the many factors that determine the effectiveness and ranking of your CX is the online reputation of your company. In fact, the contribution of ORM is CX is only increasing by the day, as access to the internet is increasing for more and more people, and companies have begun to pay more attention to what customers say about them online. Hence, ORM may be considered as an integral component of CX for any company, no matter what domain it belongs to.
Let us look at some reasons why ORM is necessary for CX.
1. Testimonials:
ORM software and portals contain a number of different tools that make the assessment of your customer service a lot easier. However, a leading capability of these ORM tools is to ask customers for reviews after they have availed of your services. Customers who have had a positive experience can then be asked for further details of the experience, and whether they would like to share their experience with the rest of the world. This can then translate into testimonials, which may be taken via text or on video. You can put these testimonials on your website or social sites for better traction among prospective customers.
2. Fix Problems With Your CX:
This is perhaps the most important use of online reputation management. ORM allows you to monitor the reactions of your consumers online in real-time. If there are any issues that customers are facing with your CX, ORM will help you determine what these issues are, and help you fix them quickly. Without ORM, it would take significant customer feedback, as well as a much longer time, before you are able to pinpoint exactly what the issues might be with your CX. This could lead to vital issues already having deteriorated beyond control by the time you realise.
3. Rank Higher:
If you are a new company, or even if you have just transitioned to the online space from mostly offline operations, the way your prospective customers are going to find you will be through online search engines. However, search engines are not so easy to appear on. Your website must have just the right keywords, just the right, content, and must be appropriate with regard to multiple other factors to even appear in major search engines. After this, ranking high in these search engines is yet another art. Among the major ways you can rank high in search engines as a brand, without paying for it, is having a robust online reputation. If customers consistently give your products or your customer services poor reviews, your ranking in search results is doomed to fall. Hence, it is important to manage your online reputation to rank high in search results and get more customers.
4. Get Important Data:
If you invest in online reputation management tools, you will get an all-round view of the sentiment of the customer regarding your brand. ORM tools don’t just allow you to monitor the mentions of your brand online and the context that they are in, but also to collect data regarding these mentions over time, and analyse this data based on several different metrics. You can determine whether any changes that you might have made to your CX infrastructure in the past led to an increase in your online reputation. You can also check whether your ORM metric has improved by hiring more CX agents, and whether it is only during certain times of the day that you face problems. This data can allow you to determine your CX problems with surgical efficiency and then promptly address the issues.
ORM and CX may be considered two facets of the same department. ORM complements CX very effectively, and provides regular updates on the efficacy of your CX infrastructure. This allows you to indulge in continuous improvement of your CX capabilities, which is bound to result in better sales. Investing in better ORM tools is, hence, essential for your bottom line and can result in you improving your customer volume by leaps and bounds.