Strategies for engaging and retaining customers in a social and mobile world

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Bad Reviews - Beneficial for business?

Looking back at our previous blog, we mentioned how bad reviews, as hard as it might be to believe, are good for your business. Looking at some of our major clients, and other types of businesses associated with the same type of services, we were able to gather some significant data and relations between a good business and its bad reviews.

What stood out most are the benefits of having bad reviews on your website. The biggest and most significantly – as well as surprising – the so called ‘bad reviews’ increase your conversion rates, where consumers who just sit seek out bad reviews convert more than 70% often than regular shoppers.

That’s not all. When you keep these reviews posted and displayed for everyone to see, your company or product gets (alongside all your good reviews);

  • consumers tend to stay longer on your website, which gives you some time to persuade them to purchase your service or product;
  • receive more traffic on your webpage, surprisingly, only a small amount leave your site after seen 1 or 2 badly reviewed products;
  • showing and demonstrating client service by responding to these negative reviews;
  • and finally, customer feedback, which plays an important key in your marketing area.

A couple of bad reviews are inevitable, it’s bound to happen. Every successful business has its’ flaws, but make sure they are controllable and fixable. Otherwise, if your business is filled with negative reviews, then it’s hard to call it ‘successful’, more ‘faulty’ than anything.

Expert Moderation - What we can do for you!

The next topic we would like to mention is our expert moderation. Rating Systems’ team monitors and manages your products or services Ratings & Reviews and/or Questions and Answers to ensure perfect quality and accuracy. Moderation is a content quality assurance process that ensures appropriate standards, relevance, removes unsuitable or offensive content.

For example – Let’s say a customer posts a negative review about your product or service. If the entire review is based on abusive content or completely irrelevant to subject, our support will make sure that this review does not get published. But, if the review is relevant, and it just seems to be an unhappy customer, we will try to contact the customer first, to find out what their reason might have been for such a review. Then, if it seems to be an actually product issue, we will contact your company personally, sharing this information with you and try to resolve and see what point of view the customer is coming from.

Let’s face it. Negative reviews are somewhat important to the product. Nothing is ever perfect. You aren’t going to purchase an item that has ONLY positive reviews. Seems a little “fishy”, sort to speak. When others are talking about your brand online, we’ll make sure it’s in the best possible light. As mentioned before, these ‘posts’ might be returned to the author with an attached message explaining the reason for return or not posting.

The most important part is; you maintain complete ownership of the data that can be sent to you nightly. All of the posts are archived and are available to you anytime at the end of the day. You own all your rating & review and Question and Answer content. You are always in control. Take advantage of this great opportunity today.

Multi - Dimensional Ratings

Another great feature that we would like to discuss is multi-dimensional ratings. In multi-dimensional ratings, you are allowed to have more than one 'criteria'. The criterias are based on how you wish to rate your product or service that you provide. For example, here are some most common used criteria that Rating System provides;

  • Quality
  • Service
  • Value
  • Reliability

Remember, the list goes on. You may create any type of dimensional label, and chose from many of our dimension types. All these criterias that we provide are “weighted”. Think of it this way. Take the 2 criterias - ‘quality’ and ‘features’. To some business or individual, quality has is more important than value, and visa versa. Let’s use the iPad 2 for example. Its’ quality is superb, but there are many features that are missing for its value of money, so it seems that many believe. Flash is not integrated with Apple, thus making is somewhat of a downfall for certain customers. Of course, there are many other features it is missing. This was just one of them. So, if a person were to rate the quality for 5 out of 5 and value for features is 1 out of 5, the average rating would be a 3. But, what if this criteria were weighted differently? Let’s say instead of a 50/50% weigh, a 75/25% weigh. After being rating a 5 and a 1, the rating would still be a 4. Here’s a simple formula;

0.25 + 0.75 = 1.00

(0.25 x 1) + (0.75 x 5) =

= 0.25 + 3.75 = 4


As you assign different weight for different criteria, you then can achieve a balanced average rating. It is very useful for certain products and services that many businesses today offer and provide.

Shopping Cart Integration

Shopping carts are not just easy and reliable ways to shop online, it is also a tool used to increase your business commerce for yourself! The three available prebuilt integration shopping cart packages that Rating System offers for our clients include the following; X-Cart, Sitefinity and Miva Merchant.

Under our subscription, we will provide a special code that we generate to our customers, making it very easy to use and apply. Some of our current clients that use X-Cart are Pet-Super-Store. Comedy World has been integrated with Sitefinity, and Miva Merchant is very recent, but integration is available upon request.

These packages that we offer to our clients are mainly for paid users, included in our Platinum and Business plan. Why? SEO integration and rich snippets are all key factors involving shopping cart integration. If you do not have any shopping carts, we can still integrate it with the most common languages; PHP, Java, etc. The best part.. It’s all free! Take advantage of this great opportunity and sign up or upgrade or plan if you have to.

Please, feel free to contact us if you have any further questions about shopping cart integration, how it works, or if you’d like us to construct a package deal for you.

Social Commerce - People vs.

Let’s get one good proven fact here – people usually never trust advertising, definitely not as much as they would trust recommendations from friends and consumer opinions shared and posted online.

Doing some research while finding reports and data, which is to be said surveying more than 30,000 Internet responders in over 50 countries, more than 90% of consumers say they would rather trust recommendations from family and friends above any other type of advertising – an increase of over 15% since about 2007.

The consumers who share their reviews online rank as the 2nd most trusted source, with 70% of global consumers surveyed online stating they trust the posts on this podium, an increase of over 16% in 5 years.

3rd to 5th ranking is editorial content (60%), trusted websites (55%), and emails (45%), in the perspective range. Regular forms of advertising consisting of media such as TV, radio, and have seen a huge drop, nearly 25% since about 2009.

Stating all this, it’s fair to say that friend-to-friend shared is best for business commerce. For example, you’re not going to out and buy something you are planning on paying for and the using it to find it didn’t suffice your needs. Therefore, these important elements such as ratings, reviews and customer feedback implement on people decisions and final choices.

It’s very simple. People want to be told the truth, and nothing but the truth. They want their communication and interaction with you to be valued through honest general responses. They want the acknowledgement that what they have to say what matters.

Finally, in social business commerce, is not just a matter of exploit some channels, or somewhat maintaining a very high level of engagement, but a service or product that’s worth sharing to other people about. If you do, so will the people. And, if all these reports and stories are accurate and factitious, then Rating System can help you boost your business commerce in certain ways, increase sales and page value through SEO integration, while your product or service is being bought or used.

(Reference: http://socialcommercetoday.com)