March 4, 2024
5 min read

What Are The Most Important Features You Should Look For When Comparing Review Management Platforms?

Tracking your reviews provides you with an unfiltered look at what your customers are saying about your business. That gives you actionable insights into where you’re exceling — and, more importantly, where you may need to improve — at a cost that is negligible compared to the expense of conducting formal market research, such as focus groups or field trials. Keeping an eye on customer feedback also provides you with a sense of how frequently your business is being rated and reviewed, which will enable you to determine whether you need to make review generation a priority — or, whether you’re better served by allocating resources elsewhere.

These are important benefits that can only be gained by monitoring your reviews. However, there are numerous additional benefits that your business can reap by going one step beyond tracking your reviews and actively managing them. An online review management system, such as a cloud-based platform, makes monitoring and managing your reviews easier, more streamlined, and more efficient, ensuring your organization gets the best possible ROI — especially when you enlist our response scribes to manage your review reply strategy.

Not sure whether a review management platform is right for you, or how you should approach the process of choosing the right one? Read on to learn more about the ways your organization could benefit from an online review management tool, plus tips on what features to look for as you compare different platforms.

How Your Agency, Franchise, or Brand Can Benefit by Using an Online Review Management Tool

An online review management tool is an investment that pays for itself by boosting your bottom-line revenue, drawing more customers to your business, minimizing the number of customers you lose to competitors, and helping your website rank better in local searches — which, needless to say, promotes higher traffic to your business. Here are just a few of the ways that using an online platform to monitor, manage, and respond to your reviews can yield positive long-term outcomes for your business.

Increase customers’ trust and loyalty. Using an online platform enables you to provide faster support to your customers, whether that means putting out fires from negative reviews or simply thanking someone for their 5-star rating. Meet reviewers’ expectations to receive speedy replies while simultaneously building trust in your brand.  

Gain more control over your reputation. Negative reviews can shatter your carefully crafted image — especially if they sit around for days, weeks, or even months while going unaddressed by your business. For anyone reading your reviews, that sends a discouraging signal. Never miss a negative review — or the opportunity to make things right — thanks to customizable alerts and notifications.

Dominate your competitors in local searches. Google support explicitly recommends responding to reviews as a way “to improve your local ranking on Google,” “improve your business visibility,” and, last but not least, “increase the likelihood that a shopper will visit your location.” Learn more about Google’s recommendations for improving your local ranking.  

Limit costly customer churn. You don’t need a math degree to know that losing customers costs your business money. What might surprise you is how much churn you could prevent — and in turn, how much money you could save — by using an online tool to help you manage your reviews more proactively. Organizations that consistently respond to their online reviews can increase customer retention by a whopping 124%.

Transform satisfied customers into brand evangelists. Everyone likes to feel acknowledged for their efforts, and your customers are no exception. Online review management tools make it easier to provide prompt, personalized responses to your reviewers — especially when you leverage our review reply service, which ensures your customers receive custom responses within 24 hours or less. Simply thanking a customer can help turn a fan into a brand evangelist who will rave about your product or service to their friends and family.

review management platform

5 Key Features You Need in a Review Management Platform  

Different review management solutions offer different features (not to mention different price points). That might sound like a no-brainer, but it has real financial implications for your business, which needs a platform whose capabilities align well with your organization’s targets and goals.

For instance, you’ll need a platform that offers plenty of seamless integrations that work with your existing apps and software. That’s why we designed our platform to seamlessly integrate with your CRM or POS via API or secure file transfer, enabling automated review requests and taking pressure off your team.

Other than integrations and automation, what other features or abilities should businesses look for in a review management platform? Here are four additional details to keep a lookout for:

  1. Reporting and analytics. Choose a platform that provides you with daily, weekly, or monthly reports so that you can track patterns, spot trends, and adjust your business strategy in response to the data.
  2. Cloud-based technology. Storing data in the cloud ensures that it’s accessible, retrievable, and secure, no matter where in the country (or world) your team is based in or traveling to.
  3. A high degree of personalization. Data shows that consumers expect content to be personalized. Whether you’re requesting customer feedback, replying to comments on platforms like Yelp, or engaging with your customers in another way, you need the freedom and flexibility to customize your content and speak in your brand’s distinctive voice.
  4. Bespoke review management solutions. No two brands have the same set of needs, and those needs will continue to shift as your business grows and expands. Whether your priority is to start getting more reviews, remove unwanted reviews, get on top of your business listings, begin tracking and monitoring reviews, or start responding to your reviewers, Shout About Us has a targeted solution that’s designed to scale with you as your organization grows.

Schedule a Demo of Our Powerful, Easy-to-Use Review Management Platform and Review Response Service

Don’t struggle to manage your reviews using clunky spreadsheets or a disorganized jumble of apps. Get everything you need in one secure, centralized hub that empowers your team to do it all, from monitoring reviews and identifying feedback trends to responding to customers and sharing across social media platforms. Automated review requests save your team time while driving increased web and foot traffic to your business — and if you receive a review that’s false or misleading, our review removal team will make sure it’s handled promptly.

Boost awareness of your brand, improve your local SEO, retain a higher percentage of customers, build buzz with social posting, get insights from your customers, and more. Our review management platform makes it simple and secure, equipping you with the tools you need to gain the competitive edge.

Discover why more than 10,000 satisfied customers trust our platform to deliver results. Schedule a demo today, or contact Shout About Us to learn more.  

Emily Homrok

Emily Homrok is a freelance copywriter with more than seven years of writing experience. She joined the Shout About Us team as a content strategist in 2020.

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