Buying online in recent times has become an easy and quick way to get nearly anything you want, but lots of products aren’t as good as advertised. So the vast majority of consumers typically read the reviews of a product when considering a purchase. This means that if your product isn’t well received and gets bad reviews, it can drag your whole business. Reputation of your business can affect more than the sales of your business, although with high ratings, brick-and-mortar stores can make as much as 4.5 times the amount of their online counterparts, good reputation can convert potential customers into sales, it can boost your online presence, and help you stand out from your competitors. Reputation is so important that it can even be worth as much as 25% of a company’s total market value.

Consumers trust the internet when it comes to online reviews and that can make or break a sale if the reviews are bad or they point out fatal flaws. 90% use the internet to comparison shop for every purchase, 78% trust online reviews as much as if someone they personally knew told them that the product was good, and 68% are more likely to visit a local business after reading positive reviews. So having many positive reviews can bring in more sales. As well as bringing in more sales, a good reputation can change your business’s rank in search results – up to 15% of Google’s ranking factors are based solely on reviews left by consumers, making your business easier to find to interested customers. Going from only an average of 3 stars up to 5 stars can yield up to an astonishing 25% more views from Google alone. In 2018, 86% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses – 40% of consumers say that any negative reviews turned them away from buying there. This all boils down to the fact that having a good reputation with your customers and even other business can be vital to the success of your business by getting more people to see your products or services and more people to buy your products or services.

With how important reputation seems, as it determines a lot of the sales and how many people see your business, it should be a top priority for anyone who can make any kind of difference in that regard. But a surprising number of business owners don’t devote nearly enough time to their reputation, but that’s not to say some don’t as around 70% brand representatives spend up to 20% of their time on online reputation management. This is mainly due to a lack of time so they can’t manage their reputation or that they are lacking the software that they would need to be able to effectively manage their reputation. A lot of managing your reputation is a lot of simple grunt work that AI can easily do, such as replying to customers’ questions and concerns, and many more.

Find out how AI will be able to make managing reputation online a huge amount easier here.