Do you know your review universe?
When an irate customer goes online to vent out or when an elated customer takes the trouble to write you a few words of appreciation, both merit an acknowledgement and a timely response. But you can only respond if you know that a review has been posted on a certain online platform. As you work tirelessly to build and guard your reputation both online and offline, a fundamental step is to proactively identify and monitor your digital review universe.

The who’s who of your review universe
Identify your review universe i.e. the online review websites and social media relevant to your business. Depending on the nature of your business, you can identify websites specific to your industry. For instance in the apartment industry some of the relevant websites include ApartmentRatings.com, Apartments.com, and Google Reviews. You should also investigate the city pages, and local listings relevant to your geography. These are some good sources to begin with:
Hubspot
Business News Daily
Digital Current

Listen and record
Track your review universe on a daily basis. You could do this internally or by outsourcing review monitoring to a third party. Maintain a daily and weekly log of all your reviews. The log should include— Name of the review website, review, date, name of the reviewer, and response.

Search for trends
Review the reports with your team on a regular basis to analyze and call out trends as reflected in your reviews. What are people saying? Do you have multiple people complaining about the wait time at your restaurant or residents complaining about the delayed response by your maintenance staff? If you are consistently getting a stream of negative reviews then chances are that there is a loophole at your end. Is there something wrong with your product, its delivery, your customer service representatives, some external factor, or some management policy issue?

What’s up with competition?
In building and guarding your reputation, it’s also important to monitor the chatter about your competitors. Know your three biggest competitors, identify their review universe, monitor their reviews across all review platforms, and dissect their highs and lows.

Benchmark
Once you’ve identified some notable trends about your business and your competitors business do some benchmarking of your business v/s competition. Review your high notes, low notes and where you are completely missing the boat.

Step by Step Guide to Identify Your Review Universe

Managing your reviews online requires meticulous thinking and planning, coupled with a ton of patience and perseverance. Identifying your review universe is rudimentary to the whole process. With 97 percent of consumers reading reviews about local businesses and 90 percent being influenced by positive reviews, you really need to keep your eyes and ears open to your business reviews across all review sites frequented by your customers.