Reputation Management Terms

Amplify

Amplify is the website review widget suite by online reputation management software ReviewTrackers. Each Amplify widget displays all or a curated set of online customer reviews on your website and is designed to inspire shopper confidence and drive conversions.

Using Amplify to display online reviews on your website is a great way to convert your website visitors into customers. For today’s top marketers, displaying reviews on their brand or company website is an effective reputation management and word-of-mouth marketing tactic.

Ask Tool

The Ask Tool by online reputation management software ReviewTrackers is the easiest way to generate online reviews, capture first-party and third-party customer feedback, and calculate Net Promoter Score (NPS).

The Ask Tool helps your team close the feedback loop and drive review volume growth with zero lift. With it, you can turn happy customers into brand advocates on the sites that matter the most — with the peace of mind of knowing that ReviewTrackers keeps your customer data secure at all times.

The Ask Tool enables brands to fully customize all aspects of their campaigns, including content and design elements, in an easy-to-navigate interface.

Business review sites

Business review sites are websites where consumers can read and write reviews about businesses, products, services, and experiences. Getting listed on the right business review sites is one of the most effective ways to improve your brand presence, boost local SEO performance, and acquire new customers. That’s because online reviews — more so than traditional marketing and sales messages — heavily influence consumers’ purchase decisions.

Corporate reputation management

Corporate reputation management typically involves a combination of strategies used to shape the consumer perception of your brand.

Apart from media relations, PR efforts, and press release distribution, managing corporate reputation can also involve local SEO (search engine optimization), powerful community management, reputation marketing, employer reputation management, and customer experience marketing as parts of a single holistic process.

Customer experience management

Customer experience management (CEM or CXM) is defined as “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations, leading to greater customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”

For organizations of any size, CEM can be a complex and challenging process that involves strategy, integration of technology, and executive commitment. Elements of the process range from deploying customer experience management software and capturing customer feedback to developing service training programs and launching strategic sales and outreach efforts.

The end goal is to achieve a complete and accurate picture (360-degree view) of your customers, with integrated up-to-date customer data, so that your company can monitor, manage, and organize every interaction throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Customer feedback system

A customer feedback system — which these days usually takes the form of a software product or application — helps businesses manage what customers are saying on multiple feedback platforms and channels, as well as gain data-driven insights essential to improving overall customer experience.

Beyond data collection, customer feedback software can also offer analysis of data from customer feedback. Often, this is done with customer experience analytics. This analytical technique brings customer feedback to life by enabling your business to find hidden trends and patterns from unstructured data and textual information. Often, this is made possible by advanced machine learning techniques and natural language processing technology, which empower teams to visualize the entire customer journey and provide a consistent customer experience.

Employee branding

Employee branding refers to the process of shaping and promoting the image and reputation of a company through its employees. It involves getting employees on board with the values that your brand stands for and the type of business your company engages in.

When done correctly, this translates to employees organically talking about the brand through word-of-mouth marketing and social advocacy. Also, organizations with a positive employee brand often have an engaged, motivated workforce that’s willing to advocate for the company’s brand, products, and services.

Enterprise feedback management

Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is a term used to describe the systems, processes, tactics, or software tools that companies use to capture, manage, analyze, and report on customer feedback and data.

The goal of enterprise feedback management is for a company to achieve a more accurate understanding of its customers, and to ensure that these customer needs are met at every touchpoint.

Fake reviews

Fake reviews often come from service providers or vendors that sell both positive and negative reviews, or from business owners who write their own fake reviews to attract customers, including fake negative reviews of their competitors.

Often referred to as review “astroturfing,” the practice involves preparing or disseminating a fake review that a reasonable consumer would believe to be a neutral, third-party testimonial.

Not only does astroturfing violate the trust that consumers place in online reviews. It also destroys the credibility that other companies have worked so hard to build.

Listing management software

A listing management software solution is a tool designed to help your company create, claim, and update your online listings across multiple business review sites and directory sites.

Listing management software can support your goal of building and growing your online presence on platforms where consumers are looking to discover and engage with businesses. This amplifies your local search signals and brings you closer to consumers who are looking for businesses nearby.

Local listings

Local listings appear in search results when people search for your business online. Not only do they display your business information; but they also play a vital role in determining your brand reputation, search engine rankings, and revenue.

When people search for your brand or business name online — or when they search for a product or service you provide — your local listings are (ideally) displayed in their search results. However, these must regularly be updated. Incomplete and inconsistent listings and listings with wrong or outdated data can confuse and misdirect consumers and impact your traffic and revenue performance.

Local SEO

Local SEO (search engine optimization) refers to the process of optimizing a website or online presence to improve its visibility and rankings in local search results. It is specifically geared towards businesses that serve customers in specific geographic locations.

When done correctly, an effective local SEO strategy equates to a higher search engine results page (SERP) ranking, which means more SERP exposure, new customers, and more revenue.

Location pages

You can think of location pages as silos or micro-sites that contain optimized content about each of your business locations. These pages are all linked to your main website. Sometimes, they are called your city landing pages or service area pages, encompassing all your locations’ key information for customers and search engines.

Location pages can be a powerful local SEO (local search engine optimization) driver and high-ROI customer acquisition strategy, boosting your local search signals to improve your local search performance.

Natural language processing

Natural language processing is the ability of a computer program to understand human speech as it is spoken. Today, companies are using this technological innovation to interpret customer feedback (from online reviews and social media comments, for example) and unlock insights.

Using advanced machine learning techniques, NLP models can read through thousands of reviews, comments, and feedback in the time it would take a human to read through just a few. The right NLP technology will provide valuable summaries, trends, and statistics that can be applied to support data-driven decision-making and business innovations.

Net Promoter Scoring

Net Promoter Scoring (NPS) is one of the most widely used management tools for companies looking to gauge customer loyalty.

First introduced by Frederick Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article, the Net Promoter Score survey methodology is one of the most popular customer satisfaction metrics utilized by organizations today.

Using NPS means asking the question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend our company, product, or service to a friend or colleague?”

Online review management

Online review management is the business process of monitoring, analyzing, responding to, and generating customer reviews across multiple business review sites, usually with the aim of supporting a company’s marketing strategy and improving overall business performance.

By managing reviews, you can protect and improve your online brand reputation, boost your search engine performance, and foster brand trust among existing and potential customers.

Online reviews

Online reviews play a big role in how today’s consumers judge businesses. Before your potential customers even go to a physical location, they read online reviews on websites like Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Tripadvisor.

According to research, 94% of consumers say they have avoided a business after reading a negative review. It’s important to understand that online reviews aren’t just a way for consumers to express their opinions about a product or service. Reviews can also influence a business’s search ranking. They can even be leveraged as marketing tools to improve reputation and revenue.

Performance Score

ReviewTrackers’ Performance Score uses data from a brand’s ReviewTrackers account to help teams determine a course of action for improvements.

Scores are based on a 5-point scale and used as a benchmark to help teams easily understand the performance of their business locations. The details that go into calculating the Performance Score also help take the guesswork out of an organization’s reputation management strategy — by providing actionable insights on how to foster and accelerate operational improvements to their business.

Recipient Details

A new feature of ReviewTrackers’ Microsurveys tool, Recipient Details enables brands to define specific data fields based on transaction information they have from their own systems and tools, such as email automation platforms (e.g. Hubspot) or customer relationship management (CRM) tools (e.g. Salesforce).

This enables users to leverage customer transactional data in order to contextualize data from customer feedback, survey responses, and online reviews. This means you can, for example, uncover trends in the feedback left by reviewers who ordered a specific menu item. Teams can even set up Recipient Details related to, say, loyalty tier, helping unlock insights into what customers love the most or find most rewarding about their experiences.

Reputation management

Online reputation management is the use of multiple strategies to influence and improve the online perception of your brand.

This generally involves managing your business information across search engine results and online listings, monitoring what’s being said about your company, and encouraging customers and fans to champion your brand online.

Reputation marketing

Reputation marketing is the process of managing and influencing consumer perception of a brand or business. The goal is to highlight the positive qualities of the brand and promote these in a way that converts leads and shoppers into customers.

The discipline involves collecting and amplifying positive brand content in order to use your brand reputation as an asset that enhances your marketing efforts and campaigns.

Reputation score

Your reputation score is calculated based on your business performance across the top social media and business review sites, including Google, Facebook, Yelp, and Tripadvisor.

It takes into account the user-generated content that shows up in search results when consumers search for your brand, as well as what customers publicly say in their online reviews and ratings of your business.

Review gating

Review gating (or, more casually, “cherry-picking” reviews) is an increasingly common business practice that involves sending customers a feedback request or survey form — usually through email, SMS, landing pages, or social media.

Based on their form responses, customers are then asked to either post a review publicly if they had a positive experience — or share details of their feedback privately if they had a negative experience.

Review gating is generally discouraged by review platforms and regulatory bodies. You can’t choose specific people (“selectively solicit”) for a review, and you can’t discourage customers who had a negative experience from writing reviews of your business.

Review management software

Review management software is a software solution designed to centralize all reviews from all your locations in one place.

Depending on how comprehensive it is, the best review management software can also help your company collect and solicit customer feedback across multiple touchpoints and channels, leverage tools for analyzing data and extracting insights that help drive business decisions and operational changes, and plan strategic initiatives that result in improved customer experience.

Social proof

First coined by Robert Cialdini in his psychology book Influence, social proof — sometimes called informational social influence — is often described as a psychological and social phenomenon in which people assume the actions of others in order to best reflect what is considered correct behavior for any given situation.

In today’s social media age, online reviews have emerged as one of the most potent forms of social proof. Diners rarely visit a restaurant without first checking Yelp. Travelers seldom book a room without first going to Tripadvisor. Shoppers rarely buy anything without first reading what previous verified buyers had to say on Amazon or Google. In short: reviews are social proof in action.

Syndicate reviews

Review syndication is the process of accumulating, sharing, and distributing customer-generated reviews across multiple sites — brand websites, retail sites, social media, review sites, and search engines — to reach more consumers.

Smart marketers today are integrating syndicated reviews as part of their online review management strategy, with the goal of improving brand awareness and boosting their word-of-mouth marketing efforts. By syndicating review content, brands can exponentially increase their visibility, amplify their online reputation, and reach a bigger audience.

Unsolicited feedback

Unsolicited customer feedback is feedback shared by customers without having been prompted or asked to by the business.

With more and more consumers choosing to ignore lengthy surveys in favor of quick posts on websites like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and Tripadvisor, unsolicited feedback has become an increasingly valuable source of information for companies looking to understand how their customers really think and feel.

Voice of the Customer

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a business and technology term used to describe a process that aims to capture customer’s expectations, preferences, experiences, and feedback.

Often applied as a market research technique by firms looking to achieve a better and more complete understanding of the customer, VoC can also help companies measure and understand the experiences that they deliver to customers.

White-label reputation management

White-label reputation management is a “re-brandable” type of service, solution, or reputation management software designed to shape consumer perception of a brand.