What reputational risks can you avert using an online reputation tool?

Brand managers would swear by this famous quote by Warren Buffet – “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

Brands invest heavily in building their equity using thorough programs and methods. Beginning with defining what the brand’s essence is and reinforcing this through a series of well thought through campaigns and advertisements, both offline and online. Every campaign which resonates with the audience adds incrementally to the equity. Equity is therefore built brick by brick. There are no short cuts and no overnight success stories in building enduring brands. Consumer product giants such as P&G and Unilever have made a process out of this and have successfully created several billion dollar brands.

In contrast, the thoroughness in safeguarding brand equity is missing. No wonder we see great brands such as J&J, Nestle, Volkswagen, United Airlines amongst various others suffer reputational losses. Some of these losses could have been significantly reduced or in a few cases completely avoided had robust reputation management processes been in place. This article attempts to understand what role an online platform for reputation management could play in safeguarding a brand’s reputation.

What is reputational risk?

Let us begin by defining risk. Risk is defined as the probability of losing something valuable. In the case of reputational risk, this simply translates to the probability that a significant loss to a brand’s reputation could occur.

Unlike uncertainty, risks are measurable. Risk can be quantified by simply considering the probability of the loss in brand equity and the value lost. This measurement provides a framework to categorize brand risks. In the context of reputation management, the risk can be:

Low risk: If the reputational loss of the brand is visible to a few individuals or households. An example would be poor customer service, leading to a poor perception for the end customer and her circle of influence.
Medium risk: If the reputational loss impacts the perception of more people, let us say up to a few thousand. Consider a poor customer review or feedback which features online and appears high on search results. Such reviews are read by several potential customers. Any purchase decision adversely affected by such reviews is a direct loss to the brand. The brand equity loss would be multiple times this because the negative perceptions linger and spread through word of mouth.
High risk: If the reputational loss impacts the perception of millions of people. This happens when a complaint becomes a crisis. Or a negative customer experience finds its way onto mainstream media. An example is what happened in the case of United Airlines. A video recording of a passenger being forcibly evicted went viral and made it to national headlines. The damage of these could be in millions or billions of dollars. High risk is simply, a low/medium risk amplified on platforms such as social, print or television.

In the above categorization, the only factor which has been considered is the number of people whose perception is impacted. The other factor is the value of the product or service itself. Consider the case of a poor product experience of a CTO/CIO with an ERP system. The damage could be limited to a few within the network of this senior professional, but the quantum of damage could be very high, corresponding to the ERP systems’ worth.

How can reputational risks be mitigated?

Reputational risks can be mitigated through active monitoring. We should look both outside in and internally to measure the perception of the brand and mitigate brand risks. We define both here, in more detail:

Outside in – Monitor, in real time, all inputs one can gather from media mentions or mentions of the brand on social, review boards as well as job boards. This is a crucial input and helps identify potential risks immediately.
Internal – Implement a net promoter score (NPS) measurement for important customer interaction touch-points. This helps gather feedback directly from customers, typically right after their interaction with the brand.

Implementing such systems help measure & characterize risk, understand root cause of issues customers face and use this information to mitigate the risk.

Brand reputation risk and online reputation management?

Online reputation management (ORM) systems help in measuring and mitigating reputational risks for brands. Here’s what enterprise ORM systems do:

Real time data in one place. Such systems bring all the data, in real time, at one place. This helps brand teams monitor mentions of the brand across channels such as news, social, review boards, blogs, job boards amongst others.
Visualize emerging stories. ORM platforms help visualize emerging stories, breakaway trends which can help identify low-medium risks that could evolve into high risk events. For example, a customer experience being retweeted widely, or being retweeted by influential handles should ideally bubble up and get the PR/communications team’s attention.
Enable customer engagement. Enterprise ORM systems allow for customer engagement right on the platform. This helps mitigate risk by engaging the customer and resolving their issues at a personal level.
Escalation Systems. Good ORM platforms allow for different escalations based on the severity of the issue. For example, an unusual mention volume or a negative news in any local/mainstream media should automatically be escalated to senior team members. This helps get the right person’s immediate attention and mitigate potential high risk events.
Geographic insights. A negative story going viral can oftentimes be limited to a specific location. Understanding stories or issues by location is important. A good ORM system should provide heat maps which show issues by location, making the risk mitigation efforts more focussed.

Going back to Warren Buffet’s saying, the few minutes which the brand gets to react/respond to an issue or crisis can make a big difference. Implementing a good brand reputation system can help understand where and how to spend those few minutes.

Making gold of “Hamberders”

Burger King is earning itself a reputation – of actively listening and making gold out of seemingly inconsequential moments.

Our earlier blog had referred to the moment which Burger King capitalized on and hit the home run on customer engagement. That was when the brand made a quirky tweet riding of Kanye West’s tweet about McDonald’s. That tweet alone got over a million likes!

Burger King’s impressive team was at it again. This time using a moment provided by US President Donald Trump. The context: President Trump hosted the Clemson Tigers team to a feast of “Fast Food.” A tweet from his official handle proclaimed: “Great being with the National Champion Clemson Tigers last night at the … massive amounts of Fast Food (I paid), over 1000 hamberders etc. Within one hour it was all gone. Great guys and big eaters!”

The tweet was eventually deleted and replaced with the edited version, but the “Hamberder” moment was there to be taken. And Burger King’s social media team did not disappoint. Here’s what they tweeted.

The engagement metrics (as on the time of this post) are tremendous (and can only get better). The likes are nearing half a million and retweets could breach 100,000! Imagine the reach the brand achieved from just a text tweet – no production costs, no media spends. Importantly, the association the brand has built with its customers – standing for being young, witty and bold! A lesson for many brands and social media teams.

Active social listening yields ROI is many ways. This is just one smart way.

The Ultimate Glossary of Online Reputation Management Terminology

In one fell swoop, investors wiped out $40 billion off the market value of Johnson &Johnson, when Reuters reported that the healthcare giant has known for decades that its baby powder is tainted with asbestos. Whether it’s an over-reaction or just retribution, time and the courts will decide. In the meantime, we have to see how J&J manages its reputation both online and offline, given its handling of the 7 deaths caused by its cyanide-laced Tylenol pills in 1982, which is held up as an exemplary study in crisis management.

The ground rules for reputation management have changed, and the need to manage online reputations has become an additional requirement for individuals as well as companies, big and small. Refer to this glossary of Online Reputation Terminology to familiarize yourself with the terminology of online reputation, before strategizing to manage it.

Affiliate Link: When advertisements are shared through an affiliate marketing program, they use a link which contains a unique ID or username of the advertiser, to track the traffic sent to the advertiser’s site – which determines what they get paid for the sales generated.
Aggregators: These applications keep track of online conversations about you, your brand, and your industry on major social media networks. They then combine this information for easy viewing on one service or site. Aggregators may be curated by machines or humans and come in all sizes.
Algorithm: This is basically a formula which is used by search engines to decide a website’s rank. So, you know who (or what) to thank for your position at number 1 in search results.
Anchor Text: When we hyperlink a word or phrase to a different site in a clickable link, it changes color and gets highlighted. Such a word or phrase is called anchor text.
Astroturfing: The reviews and comments are all fake!
Attack Blog: Ever seen a blog which is created for the sole purpose of attacking/defaming an individual, company or group? Such blogs are also known as Attack Blogs.
Authenticity: Basically a judgement of the quality of a blogger or an online community. Adds value, for obvious reasons. They use white hat SEO strategies and offer legitimate content.
Black Hat SEO: Unethical practices which attempt to raise a website’s rank in search engine results
Bot: Software which Bot which can manipulate the content on webpages, infect systems, perform online tasks like scraping content from a webpage.
Brand Ambiguity: When a brand has a common word for a name, the ambiguity makes it difficult for the brand to stand out in the search landscape and even for their customers to find the brand’s website.
Branded Content: The content a brand puts out to promote their products/services with a specific target group, and to build a rapport with them
Brandjacking: Happens when someone masquerades as your brand online, using a website which falsely pretends to be yours. This may be just a parody or a protest. It can also be a fraudulent effort to cash in on your brand’s reputation to sell imitation products which counterfeit yours. Some of them just squat there, knowing that the rightful owner will need to claim that particular site, page or social media account and would be willing to pay them to vacate it. This can happen to individuals too, with celebrity status.
Brand reputation: Brand reputation is about how the name of a company (or an individual) is viewed by others. A favorable brand reputation translates to trust in your name, product or services while a negative reputation could affect your prospects negatively and require a strategic approach to brand reputation management, especially in the aftermath of any negative publicity.
Brand Safety: Brand safety in the context of Digital Marketing applies to the processes, tools and strategies which are adopted to ensure that an online ad does not appear in a context which could potentially cause damage the brand.
Command Center: Generally, a command center is a place which is used as a centralized place from which all commands are issued in a war. In digital marketing, the campaign is equated to combat preparation with action being decisions made across multidisciplinary teams like web, social, production, creatives and media buying. These teams use lots of insights derived from various sources, including social chatter to help formulate their strategy.
Concern Troll: People who post offensive and hurtful comments, while pretending to be helpful and supportive.
Content: Information delivered in any format, whether text, images, videos or podcasts.
Content Aggregator: A software or web application which collects, combines and publishes a range of syndicated web content (such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts and video blogs). Software or web application which collects all the syndicated web content (whether news headlines, blogs, videos or podcasts), combines it and publishes it.
Content Communities: Any site which promotes the sharing of multimedia content, whether images, video or music, in an organized and searchable way. They encourage comments and support. YouTube or Pinterest would be some examples.
Content Farms: These farms generate a high quantity of low quality content to be posted online with the sole intent of ranking high on internet searches..
Content Strategist: Internet content can be written, or be audio or video content. The content strategist plans this shared content, keeping a brand’s objectives and goals in mind. The aim is to bring in additional audiences by engaging with a set of online influencers and growing a specific set of targeted audience.
Covert Attack Blog: Blog owners pretend to be someone else, and create content which damages their reputation.
Crisis Management: As social media presence becomes mandatory, organizations as well as individuals find them facing some crisis or the other, which could mar their reputation. It’s essential to turn the tide with immediate, confident and flexible reactions which reach as many people as possible, while keeping all the stakeholders in the loop.
Digital Assets: The term describes online images, multimedia and textual content files.
Digital Footprint: All the digital information left online by a person, on account of their activities online.
Digital War Room: Digital marketers are seeking to monitor and manage their customer’s entire journey, track and measure customer behavior to derive actionable insights to support their sales efforts. Digital war rooms are usually managed by proactive cross-domain teams, which are well-informed, responsive, and geared to take collaborative decisions transcending the silos.
Domain/Cyber Squatting: People register a domain using other people’s trademarked or brand names, planning to profit from selling it at an inflated price to the original owner of the name.
Doxxing: Doxxing describes the hacking of a person’s personal and financial information, using online tools across various sites, with a malicious intent. The information is just dumped for public consumption online for anyone to see.
EdgeRank: Refers to a tool used by Facebook based on algorithms which manages the updates, posts, photos and other information shown on a person’s Facebook news feed.
Ewom: Stands for ‘Electronic Word of Mouth’. Trust-based opinions based on opinions, recommendations and reviews which are posted online aimed at generating awareness and new business in the process. It’s important to have the content which is supported by known and credible sources.
Faceplant: A digital act of falling flat on one’s face is when someone unintentionally damages their own reputation by reacting in an aggressive or negative way on insignificant topics.
Forum: An online site which enables its users to ask questions, provide answers and receive feedback in a group.
Hate Sites: Both companies and public figures fall prey to hate sites which are ad-hoc websites which carry insults, false information, negative opinion/reviews which masquerade as the truth, using even illegal content.
Identity Assault: Someone impersonates the victim and launches an attack on the credibility and reputation of the victim.
Identity Confusion: A person with a clean personal record may still suffer on account of someone else, whose criminal activities, inappropriate photographs and improper social media activities appear on an Internet search with their name.
In-depth Sentiment: A truly comprehensive understanding for how people feel about your brand, using their online behavior and activities.
Influencer: These are key persons who drive a brand’s message to the larger market. Many brands are focusing on inspiring (and even hiring and paying) influencers to convey their message to a larger group of consumers.
Influence Score: Social scoring metrics of an individual help us to determine the reach and ability of an influencer to exert a strong social influence and to convey their message to a larger audience on topics of interest to us. Brands use algorithms to spot relevant influencers for their context, catch their eye and establish credibility to seek collaboration and convert them to brand ambassadors, in a rather difficult and time-consuming effort.
Influencer’s Proximity Scoring: Proximity scoring an influencer helps a brand to avoid such mistakes and engage right with the influencer. When trying to roll out the best engagement strategy for an influence, it is also necessary to establish their proximity to our brand. Really important influencers need to have access to targeted content which gives them an insider’s view into developments concerning your brand, instead of sharing standard, run-of-the-mill news with them.
Knowledge Graph: The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google and its services to enhance its search engine’s results with information gathered from a variety of sources. The information is presented to users in an information box next to the search results.
Lack of Information: If an internet search for you brings up no information, that would also make you appear untrustworthy and inexperienced. It could also be an invitation to people to spread negative information about you, if they feel like it.
Libel: A permanent and public record of defamation in the form of a written word.
Link: Also known as a hyperlink, a link instantly redirects a visitor to another URL/website or a section of a different Web site. A site’s page rank on Google (and other) searches is influenced by the number of ‘inbound’ links pointing to it, and the quality of the sites they are linking from.
Link Farms: These are websites, offering an indiscriminate number of outbound links, with the sole purpose of increasing the page rank of other sites. Most search engines penalize sites connected to link farms.
Link Bait: This is a marketing technique, aimed at increasing a website’s popularity by providing content which entices visitors to include a link to the website at their own sites.
Media Monitoring: Media monitoring is a process of using social media channels to track, gather and mine the information and data of certain individuals or groups, usually companies or organizations, to assess their reputation and discern how they are perceived online.
Media Tracking: Any social media marketing effort needs to be tracked and measured to make sure that one can retain relationships with one’s clients and reap positive results from one’s marketing efforts.
Monitoring Specialist: This person specializes in listening to online conversations and identify relevant ones so as to tap into the most pertinent and important conversations.
Multimedia Content: When more than one media (like text, images, videos or podcasts) are used to deliver content, it’s called multimedia content.
Namespace: The name of a person or company online which acts as a unique identifier, without ambiguity, even when objects having different origins but the same name are mixed together.
Negative Reviews: Negative reviews online make life hard for products and services, as customers visit the sites for information as a part of their purchasing journey. Many review sites facilitate this, but the problem comes when competitors fake the reviews of a good brand.
Online Audit: This is a review of the online presence of a person or company, which takes their complete digital footprint and online actions into account to determine their online reputation
Online Communities: Also known as virtual communities these are social networks which enable people to communicate online.
Online Image: While all relevant content can make or mar someone’s reputation online, a company or person will find their image being decided by the top results which appear on any search engine.
Online Monitoring: These days, persons and businesses alike are intentionally and consciously scanning all the information and online developments which mention their name, in real-time. Such alertness and awareness help them to address any issues in time and fix them without delay, before the damage spreads onward with more people sharing the information onward.
Online Privacy: Internet Privacy enables individuals to control the flow of information and have reasonable access to data generated during a browsing session.
Online Reputation Management: It’s the act of proactively establishing, improving and monitoring the publicly available online information about a business or individual, using online interaction strategies which ensure that they stay untarnished. Design and manage your information online across online channels and search engines, as an assured way of establishing long term relationships with one’s online contacts and clients.
Page Rank: This is the rank a search engine (Bing, Google, Yahoo, etc.) assigns to a particular website. It basically determines how far up or down a site will appear on that search engine’s result pages. It’s decided using a complex algorithm and is never static.
Reputation: Reputation is a user’s perception of a brand as well as the stories written about the brand by media. Whether through online content, or offline encounters, this reputation is built by them based on their personal experience over these interactions.
Review Sites: Review sites are where users express their opinion on your brand and their experience with your brand and product. Positive reviews help your sales, while negative ones could hurt it really hard, if the review appears to be credible and well-reasoned.
Scraping: This is a way to extract information (often personal) from all available online sources using bots.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This describes a scientific and strategic approach when designing a Web site, based on the role played by keywords in deciding a website’s page rank, so that it gains a higher page rank and attracts more new visitors as a result.
Sentiment Analysis: A tool that’s programmed to track and analyze whether commenters are expressing positive or negative opinions, thoughts and feelings. Sentiment analysis is usually performed by people, but artificial intelligence-based tools are being perfected in an attempt to sense sentiments across large amounts of data.
SEO-optimized: Website or page which is designed to be accessible to search engines to improve the chances for that website to be found and ranked by search engines.
Shame Famers: Some people actually court shame to enjoy the spotlight it throws on them. Many times, this tends to inflict potential collateral damage on people around them.
Silent Slashes: Agencies are tasked with silently damaging someone’s reputation in a stealthy and anonymous attack, which usually will get noticed only after the damage is done and the pain is inflicted.
Slander: Defaming someone and damaging their reputation through the use of a spoken word in public.
Social CRM: If CRM is customer relationship management. Social CRM is the management of customer relationship using social media services, techniques and technology to enable organizations to engage with their customers.
Social Listening: Social media listening, also known as social media monitoring, is the process of identifying everything that is said about a company, individual, product or brand on the Internet. This is being done using social listening tools, and to assess what is being said and responding appropriately, and in time (which is of the essence in any social media monitoring effort).
Social Media: Using a variety of platforms, including blogs, forums and Twitter, to encourage online communication between people, which usually exerts a very powerful influence on marketing efforts.
Social Media Crisis: A social media crisis is an event which can have a negative effect on a brand’s, company’s, or individual’s reputation. There are many ways to control its occurrence. Individuals must exercise restraint in their public statements and opinions. Organizations must take the time and effort to clearly communicate the organization’s persona and social media guidelines to all employees who represent them on social media channels.
Social Media Measurement: Social media measurement gathers and analyzes data from different websites to derive different metrics like time spent on the page, click through rate, content share, comments, text analytics to identify positive or negative emotions about the brand. These in turn help to compute the popularity of a brand, individual or company and determine its success in its use of social media.
Social Media War Room: A social media war room is an essential part of an organized social media marketing tactic. Many organizations have a team of 10 or more social media activists to share a message or campaign with targeted groups, demographics or media segments, almost as a campaign of war to defend a pressing issue. This may be to launch a new product or service, combat negative review or create a buzz about a specific topic. It is considered successful only if there is a substantial increase in content sharing, fans, likes, followers and website traffic.
Social Network: The network of individuals, businesses or profiles which keeps people connected through a given social media platform, like LinkedIn or Twitter
Social Network Aggregation: Services which pull in information from various social networking sites to compile and aggregate them all in one place. This can be done by logging into just one account and accessing all updates from different sited at one time.
Social Networking Sites: Sites which are designed for people to connect and network with each other. Each individual is allotted a profile page, which they can set up, and upload information to, like their personal or contact details, photos, interests or other characteristics.
Social Proofs: When a piece of content is read, liked or shared by more people, it is supposed to be proven more trustworthy, reliable or credible.
Social Strategist: They plan and maximize their clients’ online activities between social networking sites, aligning them to their business goals by crafting their online image suitably.
Sock Puppet: An email or social media account which is set up only to publish fake online content.
Strawman: A fake person or entity online, created to manipulate search engine results and to promote an entity better over another entity in search results by manipulating and engineering the search results.
Transparency: Legitimate and scrupulous transactions with openness and sincerity in online communications.
Troll: Trolls create the seeds of discord on the Internet, with their posts and messages which are deliberately inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic in an online community.
Truth Remix: A truth which gets distorted and molded to support a different purpose, often negative (such as a mistake or shortcoming). The remix creates a ‘seeming truth’ which falls into a grey area, and can neither be accepted nor refuted.
Unprofessional Content/Photos/Videos: Unprofessional/compromising photos come in all forms and posting them online is a sure way to damage one’s reputation. Whether posted to a friend’s social media profile, leaked to the media, or scraped by a mugshot website, such unflattering photos and videos appearing in an online image search might cost you your job or business. It is not always possible to remove such images from the online resource, unless they are clearly considered to be a violation of the site’s guidelines.
Viral Media: Content which gains significant and rapid visibility from new viewers mainly through publicity offered by word-of-mouth referrals and sharing on social media.
White Hat SEO: Search engine optimization techniques which are ethical and which involve no deception.
Zombie: When a computing device is infiltrated and controlled by a third party software, which monitors all the activity taking place without it’s owner’s knowledge.

This list is by no means exhaustive, given the dynamic way the field of digital marketing is growing. Do let us know if you want us to make any additions.

How to integrate Auris with Salesforce and other CRMs?

Auris comes with ready integrations with leading CRM platforms such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho amongst others. Integrating Auris with such enterprise platforms has been an important component of our product development strategy.

How does a listening platform’s integration with Salesforce help?

Integration with CRM platforms such as Salesforce helps in what is referred to as “social selling”. Social listening helps a brand discover prospects or get alerted to an inbound enquiry in real time. These prospects are in fact by design, “marketing qualified” given that they have either:

Expressed their intent to buy a product or service without anyone’s prompting
Have reached out to the brand of their own volition.

As with any “marketing qualified” lead (MQL), the lead should be added to sales funnel. And what better way than to directly push such MQLs to Salesforce.

How does one integrate Salesforce with the Auris platform?

This can be done using an easy three step process:

Step 1: Go to Settings > Integrations

Step 2: Click on CRM > Salesforce

Step 3: You will be prompted to provide consent for the customary permissions. Click Allow. You are done!

Watch this video to understand how such integrations work.

Can I automate this “push to CRM”?

With Auris, you can. Simply go to workflows and write a rule to the effect. One of the data enrichment which Auris does is to do with detecting what we call the “Buying Signal”. You can write a rule which automatically pushes all data points annotates with a positive “Buying Signal” to Salesforce. Oh yeah, as simple as that!

Get Auris to work for you and keep the sales funnel brimming!

How to use Auris to set up influencer alerts

In the perfect world, every customer conversation would be dealt with instantly and by the right person within the brand’s operations team. The reality for most brands? This “best practice” is impractical. Enterprise brands see a high conversation volume which makes monitoring and addressing each conversation a challenge. Prioritization of conversations is therefore important.

Influencer alerts are one way to prioritize. Simply put, such alerts notify the right people within the brand or operations teams as soon as an influential person mentions the brand. This ‘as-it-happens’ alert helps prioritize and get the right response out within minutes of the mention.

Besides prioritization, brands using influencer alerts can achieve two important things:

Reduce the risk of crises driven by negative mentions by influencers.
Leverage influencer mentions to the brand’s advantage.

Burger King used influencer mentions to their advantage effectively. By monitoring influencer mentions, the brand could respond to Kanye’s famous tweet about McDonald’s in a quirky fashion within less than 3 minutes. The result? Millions of reactions to their three-word response! Imagine the significant reach and uplift in the brand’s recall metrics this simple action of the brand would have achieved. Would this be possible had they not monitored influencers effectively?

Numerous such examples exist where brands have either averted crisis using influencer monitoring or used influencer mentions to their advantage.

How does Auris enable Influencer Alerts?

It takes all of 2 minutes to set up influencer alerts on Auris. The steps involved are:

Step 1: Click on Settings > Workflows

Step 2: Click on the button which says, “Create Workflows”

Step 3: Choose the trigger for influencer alerts. For example, any influencer mention with an influencer score of >50 should alert the Agency head as well as the CMO of the brand. You can use multiple variations while creating such rules.

Watch this video to see how easy it is to set up influencer alerts.

As you go through the setup you would realize that you can make more complex or nuanced influencer alerts using rules. For example, you can create an alert for any influencer mention which carries a negative sentiment or if the influencer uses a specific word or phrase. These variations come in handy while monitoring influencer mentions of brand campaigns or when you have different brand custodians for different regions.

Use influencer alerts to avert crises or grab onto “viral” opportunities

By setting up a variety of rules and corresponding actions, brands can monitor and act on influencer mentions in real time. Positive influencer mentions present “viral” opportunities, just like the Burger King – Kanye example. Negative influencer mentions are important to curb potential crisis. In both scenarios influencer alerts can be potentially valuable – one where a brand can get a great mileage with zero marketing spends and the other where the brand can avoid reputational loss worth millions.

What should the online reputation management system for a bank look like?

Consider any business with a widespread footprint – a retail chain, a national bank or a chain of spa parlors. A common issue which each of these brands face relates to the effectiveness of their brand reputation management program. While such programs are run centrally, the widespread footprint makes it difficult to monitor and address issues and crises as they emerge. We take banks as an example to illustrate the challenges a banking brand may face and suggest ways to manage reputational risks.

The challenge: Multiple branch locations, multiple products and multiple customer care teams

The online reputation management (ORM) challenge which any multi-branch bank faces, boils down to the following characteristics of its operations: a) distributed brand assets, b) wide variety of products & services related issues and c) a distributed customer care team. More on each of these points below:

Multiple, distributed brand assets: Each branch location of a bank typically has some presence of its own on social/digital. Especially with the popularity of Google My Business pages gaining ground, every branch has a google places listing. This makes monitoring of customer conversations around banking services difficult.
A wide-range of possible customer issues: Banking is a complex business with a wide variety of products and services. The services range from a simple service such as providing a bank account to a consumer and all the way to providing personalized wealth management services to the top tier of customers. The variety of customer issues are proportionate to the variety of products and services. This makes evaluation of issues and the corresponding response, especially those on public review forums and social media difficult.
Multiple, widespread teams responsible for resolving consumer issues: Customer issues in the banking domain are dealt by multiple teams. Some issues are best addressed at the branch level, while others require the head office to be involved. There could be a variety of rather peculiar issues, for instance, issues related to foreign exchange, international wire transfers, investment return issues and the like.

The above-mentioned reasons make online reputation management for banks a challenging proposition.

Must have features of a reputation management system for banks.

How should banks with multiple branches and a wide variety of product offerings manage their online reputation? A good system can play a pivotal role. The ideal system is one which gets all the data at one place, gets that across to the right people within and tracks resolution end to end. In addition, a good system alerts the right teams at the right time about impending crises. What are some of these features of a good online brand reputation management system for banks? Here are five points for your consideration.

The online reputation system should source all the disparate data at one place

Data from the multitude of social pages, Google My Business pages, news, review boards local and national should flow into a central repository. Ideally, proprietary data such as the bank’s contact center recordings as well as inbound email complaints should be brought in as well. Any ORM system should be able to integrate multiple data sources. Enterprise social listening and customer insight platforms have this functionality.

Must use AI/NLP methods to be able to enrich this data meaningfully, if possible in a manner which is relevant to banking.

The users of the system should be able to identify issues by location, related product or service (for ex: is the issue related to loans or investments?) and the root cause of issues (for ex: customer service at the branch or refunds?). This data enrichment is possible using nuanced NLP techniques. With the progress being made on such numerical methods and the availability of enabling computing infrastructure, a good system should be deploying algorithms to enrich banking data.

Should be capable of automated/programmed routing of issues to the right people.

You need a system which can route the issue to the right people at the right time within the organization. The data enrichment helps decide whether the issue should go to the local branch’s manager or to the headquarters based on how the consumer conversations have been characterized by the system’s analytics engine (refer to #2).

The ORM system should be able to track the response metrics or provide integrations with support desks or popular CRM systems.

The reputation monitoring system should be able to track responses all the way to issue resolution and provide data on turnaround time (TAT) by location, function, issue type. This data and analysis is a valuable input when the brand thinks through future customer experience initiatives. Alternatively, the system should be able to push data into popular support software, Zendesk for example. Integrations are therefore important when considering deploying ORM systems for banking brands.

System which averts crises through early alerts

A bank’s reputation is paramount because customers trust a bank with their life savings. Banks can ill afford an iota of doubt in the customer’s mind, let alone deal with a full-blown crisis. To effectively manage reputation of a bank, one needs to be able to set up alert. A simplistic example: When the volume of conversations carrying a negative sentiment spike beyond a set threshold the brand team should get automated, ‘as-it-happen’ alerts. This is important to nip brand crises situations in the bud.

A very few enterprise online reputation management systems pack these features. Auris’ banking solution addresses each of these points, making it a very robust solution for the industry.

Caution is paramount.

A popular saying goes as follows: “Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.” Deployment of online reputation management systems for banks is therefore no luxury, it is a must. Systems with the characteristics listed above can provide a good shield for your brand’s safety.

Workflows: An amazing feature is now live on Auris!

The premise of the Auris platform has been to enable action using the insights gained, in real time. Some of these actions can be tactical – requiring an immediate alert. Workflows enable this by automating rule based actions.

You’ve seen workflows before, so what is unique? These workflows are more potent that the usual, because they act on enriched data. For example, a workflow can act to alert the sales team to call up a consumer showing a “buying intent”, something our AI-powered models identify in real time. Or else you can get alerted if an influential person or handle has commented about something which of interest to you. The conventional workflows can at best set an auto-reply.

Enriched data also allows for multiple people within the organization to be involved. For example, city or region based teams can get access to real time feed to any mention related to their center, city or region. Let us say supply chain issues related to a product in their region. Now imagine the utility – multiple teams within your organization receiving important alerts where the action is within their sphere of influence. This can be transformational and improve the organization’s responsiveness overall.

How do Auris workflows help?

Specific Alerts: Auris classifies comments in different ways (for example by location, by root cause of issues). Workflows help you set real time alerts for different people in your organizations by:
- Issue type (Example, push all complaints related to a product)
- Location (I am interested in all that is being said about my brand in Omaha)
- Sentiment (I’d like to see what people appreciate in my service)
- Specific words (I wanted to see everything being said about my campaign)
When an influencer says something negative? Get alerted and set up an auto escalation rule. For example, if an influencer says something negative you’d want someone senior in the organization to see that rather than wait for the natural course of escalation to happen. That is now made possible by Auris workflows.
Auto-push to CRM: Someone looking to buy your product or service. Workflows can now be set to push these automatically to your CRM. Immediate ROI for you!
Well, we also have auto-replies: You are away or you wish to send auto replies to certain types of queries. Get our bots to reply while you are away.

How to setup workflows on Auris?

Setting up Workflows is very simple.

Go to Settings in the top right (next to your Login picture) and click on Workflows.
Start by the clicking on the ‘Create a Workflow’ button.
You’d then see the following – you can now define your rules and the corresponding action(s).

The ideal way to start using Auris workflows

First, define all those insight-led-alerts which you need in real time. For example, a competitor launching a new product is something you’d like to know about immediately. Or an influencer complaining about your service.

Second, identify the teams who would be best equipped to address each one of these alerts. Enroll them in the alerts. Involve the sales team to see what kind of “leads” or “prospects” they’d wish to be alerted about.

Conduct a simple training on the process of handling these alerts. This should set your team and others in the organization to make the best use of Auris workflows.

Learn about the User, before you Leap to Reply

You’d recall several incidents where brands responded to consumers without understanding their context or who they were.

One recent example was when the great cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar, complained to British Airways on Twitter, only to receive a canned response from the brand’s official handle. Not unexpectedly, all hell broke loose with thousands trolling the brand which came across as naive and cold. The brand was responsive, but also blind, in a manner of speaking.

What is the ideal way to respond to a user? Ideally, one should understand the user’s context and only then reply. Learn before you leap to help. Consider these questions:

Would you respond the same way to a loyal, engaged customer vs. a first-time customer?
Would you respond the same way to a celebrity as to all others?
Would you use the same reply text to someone who has already complained about an issue a few times and is following up?

The challenge in the increasingly digital world where conversations happen rarely in person, less on the phone and more on social platforms is the expectation that brands respond in a humane, warm manner. The expectation is that brand’s response is not automated and cold. Remember, most often users reach out to a brand when something has gone wrong. An automated response can only make matters worse.

How does Auris help?

So, here’s where Auris helps – it provides the context of the user before you’d use the platform to respond. The context enriches your understanding of the user at three levels.

Helps you understand the user’s history with your brand – all the interactions the user has had with your brand.
Helps you understand the user’s sentiment for your brand based on the previous interactions. So you know if the user has been happy, neutral or unhappy with respect to his/her interactions with your brand
Influence score. How influential is the user? This can help you prioritize and escalate appropriately.

How do you know the user’s context on Auris?

It is easy and can be done right on the command center. Click on the top right (the three dots) of the comment card and click on the “User Timeline”. You’d have everything you need. The history, the sentiment as well as the influence score. See a real example below.

Being responsive is great. But sometimes an insensitive, cold response, however fast it came through, could hurt the brand rather than help. Our advice to brand custodians? Look and learn before you leap!

The Dashboards of Auris: What Stories do they Tell?

Dashboards provide a 30,000 feet view of your brand’s performance. They help you understand the health of your brand, consumer issues and the demography of your audience. You can also gain competitive insights and access high level customer response metrics. Let’s look at the various sections of the dashboards of Auris in detail so users can understand them better and make the most of the platform.

Brand feed analysis

This tab displays data which will help you understand the overall health of your brand on date, as well as over time. The dashboards vary by industry (given that Auris provides industry-specific analytics), but some things are common to all accounts.

The common output includes an overall buzz volume chart, sentiment trendline, root cause analysis and audience demography. This information reflects on the overall performance of your brand and throws light on the drivers of that performance, both good and bad.

Any spike in negativity warrants a deep-dive analysis; whereas an increase in positive engagement implies that the campaigns you are running are doing well. Perhaps there is a positive news story on your brand, being shared and doing the rounds? This sentiment chart is truly a summary chart and reflects the outcomes of what has already happened.

The other charts go beyond the outcome. They help you understand what caused the outcomes. For example, what issues dominated the buzz, what locations saw a good amount of chatter and which channels contributed. Therefore, the charts decipher the underlying reasons which might have led to a positive or negative trend.

The dashboard comes with filters which help you understand consumer issues and online chatter better. For example, you could choose a combination of negative sentiment by location to understand the concerns your consumers have in that location.

Competitive analysis

The second tab on the dashboards helps you understand your competition. This maps your Share of Voice (SOV) and Share of Engagement (SOE) against that of your industry peers. You also get to understand the kind of content that helps drive up the engagement. This dashboard will also provide you with media spend insights, which is another input you will find useful to track.

A combination of these metrics reflects on the performance of your brand against that of your peers and offers insights into the opportunity areas where you can improve your performance. Learn more about how you could put such insights to use here. Understand how to add competitors to your account here.

Tickets

The third tab on the dashboards relates to tickets. If you use Auris to raise and resolve tickets and even if you use a 3^rd party ticket management platform (ex. Zendesk), you see the statistics related to turn-around time, issue type, locations, agent productivity and other details here. These are metrics which reflect your brand’s performance on responsiveness.

Creating specific dashboards on the fly.

You can also create very specific dashboards on the fly. For example, you could create dashboards related to a specific product, sub-brands, locations, brand campaigns and monitor those. All you need to do is to create what are called ‘saved searches’ or trackers. More on that later.

The dashboards within Auris are developed specially to provide marketing decision makers with all the information they would need, to understand the brand’s context and take strategic or operational actions. Sign up for a free trial and try the platform’s dashboard on your own!

How to Add Competitors for Competitive Analysis in Auris?

Understanding what your competitors publish and the reach and engagement they achieve is an important input to your marketing strategy. Using Auris you can achieve the following:

Learn from the content and campaigns being published by competing brands. [More].
Understand their media spends. [More].

This blog shows how simple it is to add competitors on Auris.

How to add competitor profiles in Auris?

To create your competitor dashboard, click on setup from the left panel. In the following screen, click on competitors.

Next, click on ‘Add New Competitor’ button on the screen.

Feed in Competitor Names, their Facebook URL and their Twitter Handle as shown in the following screen.

aaand… you’re done! Auris will now fetch all the data you need to keep a close watch on your competitors.

Understanding the competitor dashboard within Auris

There are 2 tabs in the competition analysis dashboard – Comparisons and Activities.

Comparisons Dashboard, as the name suggests, provides you with comparative charts for posts, reach, engagement and estimated media spends. See example below:

On the other hand if you’d like to see the top posts of your competitors, click on the Activities Dashboard. It will fetch for you the top posts by reach, engagement and spends for each competitor. See an example below.

Competitor analysis offered by Auris helps you understand how well you are performing within your industry. It also calculates a very important metric – ‘share of voice’ – to judge your relative popularity and standing in the industry. Share of engagement is the equivalent of ‘share of mind’ and answers this question: ‘Has your brand made an impression on your audience and captured their imagination?’.

A wealth of information, right at your command. So add on your competitors and help them teach you how you could best fight them!