3 Tips to Improve Your Brand Reputation and Get Your Business Calls Answered

With so much fraud, brand reputation is critical. That’s why services like Yelp (for consumers) and Capterra (for businesses) are so valuable. No one wants to hire the local plumber with a one-star rating or buy into the project management software that departments curse under their breath. With such a wide variety of choice, brand reputation is the currency businesses should be prioritizing.

In this article, we cover:

• The importance of brand reputation.
• Why expertise and availability shape brand reputation.
• How attestation software leads to robocall mitigation and your business calls getting answered.

It stands to reason that:

• 75 percent of customers trust brands more if they can find positive reviews of the company online
• 60 percent of customers won’t do business with a brand if negative reviews exist of the company online
• A third of business owners think their business has been negatively affected by bad reviews online
• Responding to a review in the healthcare industry can double patient satisfaction

With That In Mind...

...consider these three tips to improve your brand reputation.

1. Expertise
   Customers don’t want to feel like they’re constantly being sold to. If a brand’s website and communications are all built on the premise of immediately closing a sale, buyers will detect it. In fact, anyone who interacts regularly with the internet and social media has been trained to be an expert on sniffing out sales pitches and ulterior motives. Most consumers see right through thinly veiled sales pitches. The less altruistic a brand’s content and communications are, the less engaged its audience becomes; they learn that brand’s blog posts, social posts, and phone outreach aren’t valuable enough to bother with.
   
   To build a brand reputation that an audience cares about, a business must demonstrate expertise on its topic. The proverbial door-to-door salesman doesn’t sell vacuums just because they knocked. They show knowledge of and empathy toward their audience’s pain points. It’s how they win them over. “Oh, he gets it.” It doesn’t matter if it’s vacuums or fintech, once subject matter expertise is effectively conveyed up front, the audience assigns a positive response. In a digital world, that demonstration of expertise might take the form of content marketing. A well-executed content marketing plan impacts whether a customer or prospect picks up the phone when that company comes ringing.
   
2. Availability
   To successfully communicate with its audience, a brand must meet them where they’re at. A website, support pages, blog posts, social channels, and email outreach are all key touchpoints where connections are made. Perhaps Facebook isn’t a brand’s strongest channel, but it is still important to include in its outreach to ensure engagement is possible everywhere its audience is likely to be. Lacking for a particular channel can even reflect poorly on a brand’s reputation. A customer may doubt whether a brand really is legit if it doesn’t even have a presence on Facebook.
   
   Businesses must make a habit of measuring engagement on every channel, experimenting with A/B testing, and optimizing for the best results, including over the phone.
   
3. Trust
   What good is expertise and availability without trust? It’s like having all the cache of a name brand like Rolex but the reputation of a street vendor selling their watches at suspiciously low prices. The comparison is apt because anytime a consumer comes across a good deal on a Rolex, they will reflexively pause and investigate whether the goods are fake. Even if it’s a legitimate product, but the buyer is likely not to go through with the purchase because there are just too many fakes out there.
   
   The same dynamic takes place in business. Every time robocallers launch fraud campaigns, it’s not just their call recipients that are victimized, the companies they impersonate are damaged too. The more times callers get burned by robocaller, the less likely they are to answer legitimate calls.
   
   That’s why it’s critical that voice service providers have a reliable Know Your Customer (KYC) process in place. A robust KYC ensures service providers aren’t leasing telephone numbers to entities that are not fully vetted. All too often, B- or even A-level attestation is provided for calls from unreliable telephone numbers. It then becomes difficult for most event-based analytics engines to distinguish between SMBs and bad actors.
   
   As a result, the onus falls on businesses to invest in brand reputation services that engage in content-based analytics to capture the actual payload of fraud campaigns, which leads to definitive identification. Accurate identification allows communications service providers to report unlawful calls and avoid cease-and-desist letters from the FCC.

Robocall mitigation is key to restoring your brand reputation and getting your legitimate business calls answered again. Take the first step by learning more about attestation software, STIR/SHAKEN data, and the different types of analytics engines by downloading this free white paper.