Webcare and online image management: how do you do that?

Where people used to contact your organization by e-mail or telephone, nowadays that is more complicated. The world of customer service behind a company has changed! This can be explained, among other things, by the increased power of large websites such as Facebook and Google. On these websites there is a lot of communication about companies and organizations. Poor handling of a consumer complaint often means a negative review immediately. These reviews are picked up by the robots from Google. Google ensures that the negative review immediately comes to the fore when a potential customer searches for your company name. Reason enough to think carefully about the design of your webcare and online image management!

Webcare as an important new industry

In recent years, many organizations have expanded their customer service with an additional industry in the form of webcare. This English term means the online service that is offered to customers. A customer wants to be helped quickly via a chat screen on the website of your organization. Your organization must also be accessible via social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Increased competition means there is a good chance that a consumer will switch to a different provider. Especially if it takes him or her too long to respond as an organization. By putting a team on the webcare of your organization you can serve customers faster. Both with complaints and with questions about services and products!

Outsourcing of webcare

You can put together a team yourself, but you can also outsource this to other parties. There are several companies that offer the possibility to outsource your entire webcare to them. This way you no longer have to worry about this yourself and you know for sure that the webcare is performed by a specialist. Compare this way of working with outsourcing telephone customer service to a call center. Certainly among telecom providers, this is a popular way of divesting service processes. Do it yourself? Consider the necessary level of knowledge, availability of employees, tools and reporting.

Playful video in which social media webcare is being hacked: 

Online image management: responding quickly to complaints

Not only has webcare become increasingly important to combat dissatisfied customers. Online image management should also be an important part of your business strategy. By online image management we mean brushing away a bad image. You prevent a bad image by responding quickly to negative reviews. This does not only apply to the reviews on social media. People also leave these reviews on review websites. By responding within a short time you show other consumers that you are willing to solve problems quickly. This increases the confidence that other consumers have in your organization.

In short, webcare and online image management are two increasingly important branches of your business. Make sure you have a team that can take on these tasks, or outsource part of these tasks to an external party. This way you prevent your organization from getting a bad name among consumers.