4 Challenges to Your Digital Reputation and How to Overcome Them

If you’re running a business you may have noticed that your digital reputation plays a pretty significant role in customer acquisition, learn how to maintain it.

Challenges to Your Digital Reputation

Now that a vast proportion of the world – and your target audience – is connected to the internet, a brand’s digital reputation has become just as important, if not more important, than its real-world reputation.

One disgruntled customer can reach thousands of other potential clients and prevent them from investing in your company. This article will cover some of the top steps that you can take to safe-proof your digital reputation from many of the threats that could undermine it. 

  • Compliance and Security

As a business, it is paramount that you are able to stay compliant with many of the most recent data protection laws. This is both in order to prevent ending up on the wrong side of the law and to ensure that your brand garners no negative press coverage in doing so. Not only this, but security issues, such as credit card fraud and other weaknesses from your website, can damage your reputation and make your customers reluctant to give you their personal information for fear that their bank details will be compromised. Therefore, you should consider looking for an IT company Kansas City, as they will be able to ensure that you meet the latest HIPAA specifications and that your website and storage are protected against threats.  

  • Poor Customer Service

Whereas you can interact with customers on a face-to-face basis and solve problems immediately within a store environment, this is not the case when you are operating online. If you fail to answer customer queries and emails, update them about changes to their order, or offer a great returns policy, this is likely to reflect poorly on your brand and can stop customers from returning. Therefore, you should consider hiring a customer service team to answer emails and live chats, ensure that your contact details are clear and easy to find, and make sure that you check social media for queries on a regular basis. You should also offer a chatbot service that can automatically answer the most common questions and can be useful for businesses that only operate with a small team of employees.

  • Negative Feedback

Negative feedback can spread around the internet quicker than you might think as there are many online review websites and social media applications where reviews and recommendations can be posted. In fact, customers may also have the option of posting negative reviews on your website if you have a comments or reviews page. Therefore, to stop this feedback from reflecting poorly on you, you should station staff to find and answer these negative reviews, you should sort out problems quickly, and you should collect customer feedback yourself to ensure that any unhappy customers’ voices can be heard in a productive and non-damaging manner.

  • Non-Professional Presence

Getting online can be difficult for businesses, and this can lead to companies having a non-professional presence online. For instance, your website may look informal or unpolished, and may be difficult to navigate or check-out on, and your social media pages may lack cultivation. To make sure that you are able to achieve a professional and customer-friendly approach to technology, you should consider hiring a web designer or another industry professional who can help you to boost the appearance of your brand on digital forums.  

 

Your digital reputation is a valuable asset, learning how to identify challenges and overcome them will be an essential part of your business. Fortunately, these 4 steps will help you along the way, but you may also want to check out these useful tools to help with reputation management.