This Holiday Season, Give Customers Confidence With Reviews

According to Jay Baer, online customer service expert and author of Hug Your Haters, 80%* of Americans trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. In his book, Baer says brands must "answer every complaint, in every channel, every time."

With 81% of shoppers conducting online research before heading to a store, it's clear that consumers are going online to vet local businesses before making a purchase decision — especially during the holidays. Businesses who lack online reputation management are at risk of losing sales to competitors who monitor and manage what is being said about them online.

During the gift-giving season, people tend to venture outside their comfort zones, with more than half of all shoppers saying they are are open to buying from a new retailer. By publicly engaging with customer feedback across review sites, search engines, and social media, you'll fill customers with confidence — in both the services and products you offer, and in your attentiveness to customer satisfaction.

Building a positive online reputation may sound like a lot of work, but every business should concentrate on a few impactful things to start:

• Claim and manage your local listings, as well as profiles on review sites and social media.
• Monitor customer feedback across review sites, messenger services, and social media — and respond to everyone.
• Start monitoring your online reputation on review sites and social media. With Yext Reviews, you can monitor and search customer reviews by location across every listings site that supports them, including Google, Facebook, and Yelp.
• Reply to all reviews (both positive and negative), as well as complaints and questions on social media and forums.
• Ask your loyal customers to leave positive reviews for your business on sites like Google, Yelp, and Facebook.
• Collect positive reviews and post them to high traffic sites. Yext Reviews allows you to take the reviews that favorably show off your business and share them on your website and relevant location pages.

Make sure the best version of your business is on display this holiday season. Learn more about Yext Reviews, a comprehensive review management solution designed to help you monitor, engage, generate, publish, and analyze location reviews.

Download The Yext Guide to Holiday Prep now and learn how to give more customers confidence in your business with reviews.

*Jay Baer, "Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers| (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2016)