Businesses Are Losing Eighty Percent of Their Customers Without Knowing

Melbourne, Australia, August 26, 2015 --(PR.com)-- Businesses are losing customers way before they even get to the literal or figurative storefront. This is because the majority of consumers in the market for something nowadays will decide against a brand if they see even just one bad review. This means one dissatisfied and vocal customer can cost a business 80% of its potential audience. That’s a worrying piece of data especially if it’s only a small to mid-size business whose reputation is still being built. Unlike multi-million dollar corporations that spend a considerable amount of money on press relations and brand management, most businesses don’t have the luxury of shrugging off the effect one bad review can have on their brand.

What makes it even worse is the fact that, in a lot of cases, the owner won’t even know that the business has received a complaint. Some dissatisfied customers won’t bother notifying the brand when they post a bad review. Sometimes, the comment is posted on their personal Facebook account or a random blog post or a tweet. Businesses won’t know people are already complaining about their product or service and influencing potential audience’s opinion of a brand until it’s too late and four out of five of them have chosen the competition.

These are the reasons why the term reputation management – which only used to be a witty term marketing people throw around – has now become a legitimate industry. Businesses cannot afford to ignore bad reviews and they can’t just wait for a complaint to reach their help desk. For all they know, before the complaint got there, it passed through multiple forums, several tweets, and a lengthy Facebook post.

Vigilance is essential in managing a brand’s reputation online and, fortunately, there are tools available to help. Services like Repwarn.com exist to be able to track, monitor and interact with social media posts in real time. Users only need to set up the keywords they want the service to track and a notification is sent as soon as someone somewhere in the web mentions that specific keyword.

If the software tracks a bad review, the user can then do prompt damage control and fix the issue before it festers. Not only will the brand have the opportunity to demonstrate the competency of its customer service, there’s also a big possibility that the complaining customer will be converted into a fan. The important thing is to catch the complaint in time and counter it with excellent brand management.

The fact that reputation monitoring has become a necessity in modern businesses is undeniable. It’s important to have that kind of protection in place. The new software, Repwarn.com by Universal Media Online, offers businesses a service to monitor an unlimited number of keywords, brand names, key personnel and even competitors so that brands can receive alerts at any time those words or phrases are triggered anywhere in the world.