As per the current trends, is handling ORM internally a right way forward? We at Cerebrate feel otherwise. I have been in discussion with a lot of brands about their ORM process. Surprisingly, many brand managers feel that ORM is not the department that needs immediate investments. A few of the brands handle their online customer experiences in-house. The question is, how well is it done? Are brands able to use the golden data available online to good use? How is the quality of responses? What is the level of efficiency in handling the user queries? and many more questions to be answered.

At Cerebrate Solutions, we have renamed the term ORM (Online Reputation Management) to DCEM (Digital Customer Experience Management). Digital media has given super powers to users that has made them to be present on the platforms of their choice and post anything on any platform at anytime. A brand may be good on social media with response management, but imagine doing SEO and SEM to promote their website, and there are negative Google business reviews that are not being addressed. The ROI from the SEO or SEM activity will be the promotion of negativity about the brand by the brand itself. Similarly, doing ads to promote the mobile app where reviews and ratings are not favourable and the brand has not been attentive to them. Our recommendation for such brands would be to track user queries on all digital touch-points, and not just on their social media properties and on all 365 days.

The 4 key ingredients of our DCEM (Digital Customer Experience Management)

1. Coverage: Users are present across multiple digital platforms and seek brands assistance in real-time. Hence, coverage in terms of platforms and timing is very important. Gone are the days of 9 to 6 and Monday to Friday. A brand could be hit by any query, any time, on any platform.
2. TAT: Customers are happy when the brand responds to their queries quickly. A happy customer is a brand loyalist. Most importantly, the online users are impatient. In many a cases it has been observed that a user posting same query on multiple platforms just to create a sense of emergency at the brand. Quick acknowledgements help in reducing such emergencies.
3. Response Quality: Personalising the messages to your customer can really go a long way in improving the customer experience. If a brand is posting email type of responses on social media, they really need help.
4. Analytics: Insightful inferences can be derived from the data, that can help brands get in-depth consumer and market insights which can help in enhancing digital customer experience, in evolving products/services, and in designing remarkable marketing strategies.

There are many ORM tools available in the market built with great UI/UX, fancy dashboards, good workflow mechanism, adaptability to exchange the data between CRMs, etc. However, only having a tool cannot help, a process to utilise these tools to their fullest is required. Few brands tell me that they have been changing ORM tools, but still unsatisfied with the existing ORM process. My suggestion to them is to hire an ORM agency and you would't need to worry about which tool to use and what to expect. A good ORM process, or rather as we call it DECM process is a combination of both the tool and human intelligence.

If you are a brand that is still in the response management stage, we are just a message away for you.

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