Reputation Management: How Your Online Reputation Can Affect Your Business

Your reputation is among your company’s most valuable assets. Whether online or in the physical world, your reputation tells potential customers what they can expect when they deal with you. It is particularly important to maintain your reputation online, where leads and potential customers can easily find information — true or false — about your company. Here are some important ways your online reputation can affect your business and why reputation management is important in the online world.

• Customers have access to much of your history: Customers can easily find information about your company’s history online. You can control what kind of information is available on your official website and sanctioned social media sources such as Facebook or Twitter. Outside of these resources, however, your customers can find other material such as newspaper articles, assessments of your company on review sites such as Yelp, and simple mentions on personal blogs or websites. This information can give potential customers a comprehensive picture of your reputation.
• Customers can see your customer service in action: Potential customers can see how you handle customer service issues when they occur online. For example, if someone posts a complaint on your website, it’s easy to see how long it took for your company to respond and how you resolved the issue. Customers and leads can see for themselves the speed of response, the tone you took, and what you are willing to do to correct errors and ensure customer satisfaction. This can strongly influence a buying decision in cases where customers make emotional (rather than logical) choices.
• False information is easy to present: In the online world, it is easy for disgruntled customers, competitors or pranksters to post false or negative information about you. Online reputation management gives you the opportunity to directly address this information and correct it (or have it removed) before it can harm your company.

Construction Monitor provides the most up-to-date business management data for construction firms and affiliated companies. Contact us today for more information on reputation management and how to effectively maintain your company’s reputation, and continued success, online.