How will artificial intelligence change reputation management? Well, it’s complicated.
AI has already helped businesses understand customer feedback at scale and in ways that no human could do on their own. But, with the recent launch of content generation tools like ChatGPT, AI could also upend the feedback economy and reputation management.
The rise of the feedback economy
Today, 4.76 billion people (60% of the world’s population!) use social media. 70% of online shoppers read between one and six customer reviews before making a purchase.
The feedback economy refers to business growth powered by customer ratings and reviews. The explosion of social media and proliferation of reviews on sites such as Amazon have made businesses realise that for better or worse, ratings and reviews can have a profound impact on a company’s reputation and its well-being.
Many businesses use tools such as social monitoring to keep track of customer sentiment in real time and software platforms to respond to reviews and learn from them. Feedback gives businesses a powerful way to improve every aspect of their business, from the customer experience to operations.
The role of AI to help
Keeping up with all the ways people provide feedback on products and services is a daunting task:
- TikTok did not even exist only seven years ago. Today it’s a popular app for millions of people to share their opinions of the cars they drive, the make-up they use, the food they eat. You name it, they’re sharing an opinion.
- Facebook is the second-most popular site in the world, and Google is Number One.
These sites are sources of “data in the wild,” or customer feedback that is created and posted without the participation of the business – a review on a Facebook page, a star rating on a Google Business Profile, and so on.
So how does the rise of AI figure into all of this? AI has emerged as an essential tool to help businesses rapidly collect and make sense of all this sentiment. In fact, applying AI is the only way a business can really understand everything that customers are saying about it beyond a structured customer survey.
Implementing AI-enriched automation tools can help businesses capture CX data quickly and more efficiently. This technology can enable companies to move faster on CX performance issues before they bubble to the surface publicly. AI also makes it possible for businesses to capture and act on a myriad strands of CX data faster than before.
For instance, a form of AI known as natural language processing scans customer reviews to rapidly find patterns in feedback. Such as the word “slow service” or “expensive” emerging as a problem for a restaurant. Businesses don’t always know a problem is emerging as quickly as they should. AI helps them do that.
The role of AI to disrupt
But AI may also be the proverbial straw that upends reviews as we know them today.
The major sources of reviews – such as Amazon, Google, TripAdvisor, and Yelp — have been struggling for years with review spam. The proliferation of fake reviews can destroy the credibility of review sites. Unfortunately, fake reviews are likely going to explode. Tools like ChatGPT have made it incredibly easy for spammers to auto-generate legitimate sounding reviews. While AI can help with detecting AI generated content, early studies show that the tools out there now are not very successful.
Here are six ways that online reviews will change as a result:
- Verified customer reviews will eventually become the default for all sites that share reviews. Google placing higher weight into reviews they can authenticate came from customers of a business, for instance, would make sense to ensure actual customer reviews are being displayed.
- Many more legitimate reviews are going to be incorrectly flagged as spam moving forward. Google and others are increasing spam suppression algorithms.
- Reversing a multi-year trend, review signals will be a smaller part of Google’s ranking algorithms in the future. This is due to lack of confidence in the data surrounding them.
- The use of the term “reviews” is going to be replaced with “feedback”. Social media posts on TikTok and Instagram will become the primary way users choose businesses for certain verticals.
- Along the same lines, Google and other review sites will be more aggressively asking users for video reviews and feedback. While AI is also making progress in creating realistic videos of people that don’t actually exist, content of this nature will be much easier for review sites to identify.
- Helping businesses identify and manage fake reviews will become an increasingly important role for businesses. Especially those that provide reputation management products and services.
How can we move forward with the threat of AI’s power?
Ironically, AI, which threatens the legitimacy of reviews, will continue to be an essential way to separate the wheat from the chaff. AI is already being used to filter reviews on sites like Google and Yelp. Without it, the spam on those sites would be overwhelming and make it impossible to find the legitimate reviews.
What isn’t going to change is the human element required when responding to feedback, no matter where it comes from. For instance, AI might help draft review responses more quickly. But people are needed to ensure that what the AI creates is empathetic and follows review best practices.
Without people, there is a high likelihood that a business will respond in a way that does not meet the needs of the customer leaving the feedback. A combination of people and technology will be essential for businesses to succeed. Especially as the reputation economy evolves with the use of AI.