How to Manage Online Reputation for SaaS Companies

There are more than 3.5 billion internet users, and more than 50 percent of them are talking about the brands or products they are using. Digital customer interaction has become a new, important focus for businesses.

With the growing number of internet users and new social platforms, monitoring and managing your online reputation can be tough. Your existing customers discussing or reviewing your brand/product will affect your prospecting and new customers’ buying decision.
More than 25 percent of customers decide how they feel about a brand/company based on online reputation and social interactions. This makes it crucial for companies especially from SaaS industries to have a healthy reputation. Balanced customer engagement and being able to answer customer queries promptly is what any SaaS company wants to do to build a positive online presence. However, monitoring and managing all those online channels is not an easy task.

Here are five tips a SaaS company can use to manage online reputation.

1. Add Web Alerts

Monitoring every social or web platform twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to understand what your customers are saying about your brand is not an achievable task. Instead, use digital tools to help. Google and Owler alerts are good ways to monitor and participate in the discussions happening around your brand or company. Just add your company/brand name to the alerts and you will receive a daily email with links to the discussions. Another added benefit of these alerts is that you can monitor your competitors’ mentions by adding them to the list as well.

2. Control What You Say on Social Media

Be vigilant about your posts, tweets and replies. Social platforms are convenient and offer ease in instant customer engagement, however, this approach can backfire if you are not cautious about what you are saying and how you are replying to your customers. Don’t do what Nestle did here:

3. Make Use of Positive Testimonials

Promote positive feedback. A customer speaking highly about your brand/product is a proud moment and you need to put that up for others to see. There’s no shame in sharing good feedback, but promote it in a subtle manner. If bad feedback is easily noticed, then good feedback spreads like a wildfire. You can blog about your brand’s positive visibility or ask a blogger from your industry to write about it.

4. Promote Customer Success Stories

Customers confirming how your product/service helps them is the recipe to a good story and something your prospective customers would want to read. Create content that’s easy to consume. Use graphs, videos and pictures to make it fun to share and understand. Stories like these tend to get picked up by industry influencers and they, in turn, share these with their audience, ensuring you get more brand exposure and a positive online reputation.

5. Be More Proactive

Get out there and participate in discussions. Being proactive in your interactions with customers will give you the upper hand. You are not waiting to be talked about, but rather you are getting out there yourself. You can find these discussions by searching for keywords that match your brand/product name.

6. Deliver Home-Run Customer Service

The customer is the king and providing royalty-ready customer service is what matters. Exceptional service will get you positive feedback and reviews. Be there when your customers need you and manage their queries in the smoothest way possible. Make it a little personal and let them get comfortable with you. Zappos adds a touch of humor and are proactive in their interactions.

SaaS companies need to be more active on social platforms and get their brands in front of customers. Once the online presence is made, managing it shouldn’t be a problem, because there are many tools like Social Mention, Google Alerts, Trackur that can help.