The trend of the time: what will be relevant in SERM in 2023? Part 1

The events of last year have seriously changed the rules of the game, perhaps in all spheres of the economy. Betting on quick deals will definitely not work now; if you want to succeed, focus on building a long relationship with the consumer. In order not just to stay afloat but also to grow, you need customers who will stay with you even in a crisis. To do this, you need to develop and strengthen trust—this is the key trend in working with reputation today. All other relevant SERM trends of the current year follow from it.

Centralization and automation

Remember: Your most valuable resource is time. Spending it on manually collecting reviews and comments from dozens of sites, preparing, and posting responses is too wasteful. Especially in a large business that can receive hundreds of messages every day. Previously, full-fledged departments were allocated for this, but today it is a sin not to use automated tools. In addition, the purposes reputation management, there are a lot of them.

Modern technologies make it possible to transfer almost all aspects of such work to automatic rails:
• monitoring of reviews and mentions;
• an analysis of the sentiment of opinions;
• preparation of reports on individual scenarios

Automation is becoming almost the industry standard—and reflects the potential for further development. The centralization of work with reviews into a single smart service with the ability to track the company's information environment in real-time is becoming an actual trend.

In fairness, we note that this was not the idea last year. A new direction of work has been developing in the ORM community for several years: RXM, or Reputation experience Management. That is reputation and experience management. Of course, the client. This includes classic reputation management, brand SEO optimization, and monitoring customer satisfaction.

The essence of this approach is that the work on the image goes on continuously—the impression you need should be formed by the consumer at all stages of interaction with you. Therefore, all ORM and SERM tools need to be synthesized into a single system. And for greater convenience, implement it on the basis of an AI service. In the future, this may result in the formation of full-fledged ecosystems for professional work with reviews.

Trend in 2023: 

analyze which of the already available automatic tools you can implement today. This will not only increase your competitiveness but also help you understand exactly what difficulties may arise during the further transition to automation.

Professional work with reviews as a trend

The more difficult the situation in the economy, the more distrustful customers become. They unconsciously begin to suspect everyone and everything of dishonesty, and therefore, before giving their money to a particular brand, they try to make sure of its reliability. Reviews, ratings, and other "likes" play an important role in this. That is, what other consumers say is more important than what the company itself broadcasts.

However, there is a downside to the coin: reviews are trusted less and less. And not only people but also cars. And not in vain: already today, there are neural networks that, in a matter of seconds, can generate a whole pack of coherent, quite detailed reviews on several keywords or photos. And not only laudatory: the required tonality changes at the touch of a button.

At the same time, the algorithms of aggregator responders are getting smarter. Some of them can already accurately recognize fakes using dozens of indicators. Fakes are not only typewritten but also human. Yes, even if the review is real, it can also easily fail moderation. And in some cases, the author is required to confirm the "naturalness" of the text with a photo of the receipt for the purchase of the product for which the review is being written. The requirement is not yet widespread, but the trend is already forming. There have already been precedents when companies received a "black mark" for publishing fake reviews of their products. And this is a serious blow to the company's reputation.

Trend in 2023: 

Approach the generation of reviews responsibly. Such work should be based on a full strategy and carried out professionally. Uncontrolled cheating on the principle of "more is better" will surely work to your detriment now.