Reviews act as a different breed of influencers – more authentic and reliable. Without them, your business might appear dubious to potential customers.
About 80% of shoppers search online for reviews before completing a purchase; 60% specifically check online retailers and marketplaces for such information.
But it’s not an easy job to manage reviews, at least manually.
An online review management software is a tool that allows you to manage your reviews on a single platform. It uses automation to make reputation management easier for you, from requesting reviews to responding to them and everything in between.
In this blog, we tackle these online review management software features:
1. Collect Reviews in Various Ways
2. Run Customer Experience Microsurveys
3. Receive Real-Time SMS and Email Alerts
4. View Online Reviews In-Platform
5. Send Automated yet Personalized Review Responses
6. Manage Business Listings In-Platform
7. Maintain Multi-Location Business Listings
8. Access Highly Visual, Downloadable Reports
9. Customize an On-Brand Dashboard
10. Get a Custom Website Review Widget
11. Look Into Sentiment Analysis
12. Analyze Competitors’ Reputation
What You Can Do With an Online Review Management Tool
Here are features you want to look for in an online review management software:
1. Collect Reviews in Various Ways
Emails, QR codes and SMSes are only some avenues you can use to reach out to customers and gather reviews. Your online review management software should allow you to employ multiple methods applicable to your business for review acquisition campaigns.
If you’re restricted to email alone, for example, you risk losing potential online reviews from customers who prefer receiving business messages through SMS.
2. Run Customer Experience Microsurveys
Microsurveys, as the name suggests, are shorter versions of regular surveys. An online review management software allows you to conduct microsurveys on your website or mobile applications.
Such surveys are most effective when they target a single issue or point in the customer journey. For instance, after a support chat, a microsurvey could ask, “Was your problem solved?” with simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ buttons for answers.
3. Receive Real-Time SMS and Email Alerts
Although you can regularly do brand monitoring checks for new reviews and mentions, an online reputation tracking tool allows you to stay on top of conversations surrounding your brand and never miss a beat.
Real-time alerts for negative reviews allow for quick review response and damage control. On the flip side, promptly responding to positive feedback is a great way to engage happy customers and possibly cross-sell.Â
4. View Online Reviews In-Platform
Reviews and mentions of your brand can be found in different corners of the internet, from social media to dedicated review sites. Review tracking tools are designed to effortlessly pull every online review you have into one centralized dashboard.
With the customer feedback management dashboard, you view and manage them. For example, you can tag a review to highlight that it requires follow-up or to delegate it to a team member for action.
5. Send Automated yet Personalized Review Responses
Beyond the convenience of manually replying to reviews from a unified dashboard, a review response tool allows you to capitalize on artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline the process. AI capabilities include automated replies and crafting messages from predefined templates.
While nothing beats purely personalized responses to reviews, you can still find success in automation with advanced AI features if there’s enough room for human-aid fine-tuning during setup.
6. Manage Business Listings In-Platform
Businesses typically have listings on multiple platforms, and it’s a time-consuming job to manually maintain and update them. Some of the most popular listing directories are Google Business Profile, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, Tripadvisor and Nextdoor.
Brand reputation management tools allow you to manage your listings across major business directories in a central place. So, if you need to update business hours or contact details, you can easily do so without having to visit each platform.
7. Maintain Multi-Location Business Listings
It’s one thing to have business listings on each available directory out there. But suppose you operate a franchise with seven different locations listed on Google Business Profile and another seven on Tripadvisor, each with its own specific information and reviews to keep track of.
The best online review management software goes beyond the standard one-listing-per-platform limitation. It allows you to link and manage multiple listings within a single directory so you can likewise manage them in a unified platform.
8. Access Highly Visual, Downloadable Reports
Visually rich reports are helpful in analyzing trends in your reputation at a glance. If you have listings on several platforms, be it Google, Yelp or Tripadvisor, online review monitoring and reputation management tools can provide you with an overall review volume and average rating across platforms.
Reports are downloadable and can also show you how well your online review generation campaigns are fairing, along with metrics on average response time and response rate.
9. Customize an On-Brand Dashboard
Businesses should strive to maintain a consistent brand image, inside and out, wherever feasible. While a lot of project management tools fall short in terms of customization, white-label online customer feedback management systems provide the versatility needed for tailored branding.
After tailoring your review management dashboard to match your brand’s look and feel, it will seamlessly resemble a platform created exclusively for your business.
10. Get a Custom Website Review Widget
A website review widget is a standalone element or application that can be embedded on a specific webpage. It showcases your business reviews pulled from external sources like Google. Online reputation and review monitoring software allows you to select the most favorable rating and reviews under your name through the widget setup.
What’s more, these widgets offer customization options, including color schemes and the arrangement of the reviews to be shown.
11. Lean on Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, detects and classifies the emotions conveyed in the text to discern whether attitudes toward a specific subject or product are positive, negative or neutral.
For example, social media posts about Levain Bakery, where one expresses, “I miss Levain cookies so bad,” and another states, “Levain cookies were so bad.” Despite both using the term “bad,” their contexts are polarizing. AI-driven sentiment analysis tools discern these nuances and avoid oversimplifying both as negative feedback.
12. Analyze Competitors’ Reputation
Competitor analysis in review monitoring and reputation management involves weighing your brand’s standing on review platforms against those of your competitors. Including competitor analysis in your strategy reveals threats and opportunities that inform your business decisions.\
The insights are similar to those you’d gain from your own reports. By employing brand monitoring and reputation tracking tools, you can access detailed information about your competitors, such as their overall ratings and the volume of reviews they’ve amassed.Â
See Thrive Local’s Online Review Management Tool in Action
On top of the features we’ve listed above, Thrive Local extends more functionalities that not many providers offer.
With Thrive Local’s brand monitoring and customer feedback management tool, you can:
• Identify keywords: Reviews are rich in keywords that customers actually use. Our tool automatically identifies keywords that are repeatedly mentioned in your reviews. Uncovering new keywords helps inform your overall content strategy.
• Gauge your performance: An overview of your performance is helpful for quick reputation tracking. The performance score, shown on the dashboard, synthesizes your average rating, review volume and other reputation factors into a single metric.
• Import first-party reviews: There’s no reason to say goodbye to your valuable historical first-party reviews. Our online review management software allows you to import first-party reviews so you can easily track trends over time.
Reach out to our team for a free product demo.
