Learn More About Review Management Software
What is review management software?
Review management software is a powerful tool that enables businesses to effectively oversee and engage with customer reviews and feedback across multiple platforms. By consolidating reviews from various sources into a single, centralized dashboard, this software simplifies the process of monitoring and responding to customer interactions. This streamlined approach saves time and enhances businesses' ability to improve their service and reputation based on customer insights.
This type of software should not be confused with review platforms, even though they serve similar purposes. Review platforms allow any product or service provider to collect reviews, while a company usually uses review management software to create its own reviews portal.
Key benefits of review management software
- Generate brand awareness to help ensure consumers are aware of the distinctive qualities of a brand.
- Encourage authenticity by allowing prospects and customers to learn about brand weaknesses.
- Allow consumers to provide feedback since a positive customer experience is essential to attract and retain customers.
- Increase sales by understanding the overall brand image
Why use review management software?
Review management software helps companies gather, manage, and analyze reviews from customers and consumers. What matters most, though, is using reviews to better engage with prospects and customers and adapt to market changes and consumer needs.
Engagement—Companies use review management tools to engage reviewers, address their concerns, and provide assistance when necessary. Engagement makes reviewers feel their opinions matter and can create relationships between consumers and brands.
Improve products and services—Analyzing large numbers of reviews can generate valuable insights into a product or service's strengths and weaknesses. Companies can use this information to improve their offering, which can improve the customer experience and boost customer loyalty.
Who uses review management software?
Reviewer feedback can benefit multiple company departments, from sales and marketing to product development.
Marketing — Marketers use review management software to capture and use reviews for promotional purposes. Review data helps marketers identify buyer personas and more accurately target prospects based on their preferences.
Sales—Salespeople use reviews to help prospects make buying decisions. While case studies and other types of content can still be useful in sales, genuine feedback from many customers is the most beneficial.
Product management — Product managers analyze customer feedback to define or improve go-to-market strategies to increase sales and customer satisfaction.
Kinds of review management software
Review management software can be categorized in various ways depending on how vendors deliver standard and advanced functionality for review management.
Best-of-breed—Most review management software focuses exclusively on collecting and managing reviews. Some products provide additional features, such as brand management and technologies like artificial intelligence. Best-of-breed software has the benefit of providing all features as a single solution at a reasonable price.
Suites—Some vendors provide functionality to manage multiple types of consumer-generated content, such as questions and answers or curated social media content. Other features that may be included are e-commerce personalization, content management, product sampling, or brand protection. Suites are usually delivered as a mix of multiple software products that can be bought and used in multiple configurations.
Point solutions — A multitude of integrations and tools focus on a subset of the capabilities included in review management tools. These tools complement but cannot replace review management software.
Review management software features
Collection—Reviews are usually collected through an online portal embedded in the company's website or online store. Reviewers can provide feedback when looking for or buying a product, but companies also use other methods to collect reviews. Some of the most important include email campaigns, social media, or pop-up ads. To streamline the collection process, most review management software solutions allow users to post multiple reviews simultaneously.
Moderation—Each review should be verified and validated to ensure it is genuine and applies to the right product. Moderation can be done automatically using algorithms to detect potential issues such as duplicate text. The identity of the reviewers and their eligibility for rewards can also be verified. Also, any changes to existing reviews should go through a validation process.
Management—Once reviews are validated and publicly available, they cannot be modified by reviewers or the company. However, administrators may need to manage reviews in certain situations. For instance, when a product is discontinued and removed from the website, the associated reviews will also be removed. If some of those reviews are also related to another product that is still active, they should not be deleted.
Visual display elements such as photos, ratings, or badges can make reviews more attractive.
Syndication—Syndication refers to using reviews to provide consumers with an overview of what others think about a product. Through syndication, companies can consolidate reviews about a product and display the results on their website or online store. Therefore, it is critical to match reviews with the right products and analyze all reviews for each product to generate stats.
Other features of review management software: Community Q&A Capabilities, Customer Service Capabilities, Engagement Capabilities, Integration & APIs Capabilities, Marketing Capabilities, Response Types Capabilities, Sampling Capabilities
Additional review management software features
Brand management—Review data provides valuable details about how a brand is perceived. Companies can monitor reviews and respond when their brand is at risk due to negative feedback. Since companies cannot remove or alter reviews because they don’t like them, brand managers need to engage and address issues as soon as possible.
Omnichannel communications—Advanced review management platforms include multiple options for communicating with reviewers, such as email, social media, or SMS. Anyone can share reviews on multiple channels and comment on and rate them.
Potential issues with review management software
Moderation—Review moderation requires necessary human and technical resources, which many companies cannot afford. While review management software usually provides functionality for moderation, this type of feature can vary significantly from one product to another. Also, moderation features rarely replace human intervention completely, meaning companies still require some moderators.
Integration—Review management systems integrate with other types of software, such as CRM, sales, and marketing automation. Since review data is essential to improving sales and marketing strategies, seamlessly transferring data between multiple systems is also important. Vendors usually provide standard integration and connectors or APIs, but these aren’t always enough for complex integrations. Companies may need to invest in additional software, such as data integration software.
Review relevance—Due to the fast pace of change in most markets, especially consumer products, reviews may become irrelevant very quickly. Companies need to constantly receive new reviews and ensure that irrelevant reviews don’t influence buyer behavior.
Privacy — While review management platform vendors provide secure features, companies in highly regulated industries often require additional privacy functionality. Examples include financial institutions, healthcare organizations, government agencies, and public sector agencies.
Increased competition — As reviews become more popular, finding new reviewers or convincing existing users to share new reviews will become difficult. More brands will try to source reviews from the same people, and they will need to provide better incentives.
