Online review monitoring services benefit businesses and customers
Roger Yu, USA TODAY
On Yelp, a popular review site for everything from restaurants to gas stations, fans of Mari Luangrath's cupcake-delivery shop have noted the "hustle" of her operation and the "subtle" flavors of its products.
The same descriptors could apply to her dexterity in honing the online reputation of her 4-year-old bakery in Chicago, Foiled Cupcakes, which has earned a 4.5-star reputation. To stay on top of customer reviews, Luangrath logs on to ReviewTrackers.com, an online subscription service that aggregates and alerts her instantly of any reviews and online comments written about her business.
Seeing a three-star Yelp review complaining that her cupcakes were dry, she immediately and privately e-mailed the customer who wrote it to get more feedback. Luangrath baked another batch with a lower temperature to induce more moisture and redelivered the goods, prompting a positive follow-up from the customer on Yelp.
"If we hadn't been monitoring it, it would've been on our Yelp page for some time," she says. "Being in the food industry, it's so difficult. Taste is so subjective. Too sweet. Not sweet enough. Too much frosting. Not enough frosting."
Businesses are watching you
Obsessive monitoring of online reviews has become a norm for tech-savvy small-business owners. The burdensome but necessary task has been made even more complex by the emergence of social-media channels, Twitter in particular, that empower opinionated customers.
But technology has emboldened business owners, too, engendering software tools that ease the process of tracking reviews on a multitude of channels and enable quick responses.
"I'm always on these sites, freaking out," Luangrath says. "It can seem like a huge time-waster, but it's something we've got to take care of every day. Timing is everything."
In recent years, "reputation management" services — Netvibes, Reputation.com, ReviewTrackers.com and Trackur.com — have opened shop to cater to small-business owners looking to outsource the time-consuming task of aggregating online reviews and comments.
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