Reviews are incredibly valuable to your business. Each positive review is a success story from your customer that can help land your next customer. Each negative review is a suggestion on how to improve your business. It’s easy to see the value of each individual review you earn for your business, but there is an even greater power when you can view, learn, and leverage them collectively.

This collective strength is why we created tags. Tags are a lightweight, flexible, and powerful feature that can deliver huge benefits in your reputation and customer experience management.

This guide is to help you get started using tags or help take your use of tagging to the next level. In short, you should be using the tagging feature, and let’s break down the why and how.

Here are the benefits that using tags and auto-tagging can deliver with a great strategy:

Tags can be applied a number of ways to 1st-party reviews both before and after the customer has left a review. 3rd-party reviews can be tagged once left only using our auto-tagging feature.

Once applied, tags show with their review in Customer Activity and in the Customer Profile for 1st-party reviews.

Here's an example of how a taco restaurant is using tags for specific product categories like “tacos” and “drinks”, specific products like their “shrimp taco”, “price” for mentioning the price, cost, cheap, etc. and also customer sentiment like “customer love” for compliments and “issue” when a customer has had a poor experience.

Customer Activity showing recent reviews and tags

Tags allow you to organize and connect your reviews in groups using whatever reasoning you decide. How you want to implement them is entirely up to you and that is part of the power of tags.

Most often we recommend that tags are used to summarize a review based on keywords, topics, themes, action needed, or sentiment. There are no set rules for tag use, they exist to help you simplify and group individual things (reviews) together.

Tags can take hundreds or thousands of loose keywords in you reviews and turn them into 3 to 6 main themes. That’s a powerful move that makes both understanding and taking action easier.

A few simple examples are:

You can look at these mentions as exact words used in the review or just your perceived context. Again, you decide.

With tags being about organization and the ability to simplify, it’s best to map out how you will use tags before using the feature. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when setting up your plan for tags.

While these three questions can provide a lot of the frame work for your business and tagging reviews there might be more for you. Use the power of tags to identify what’s important, what needs and action and what you can market (with our Tag widget).

Another exercise that we have touched on before is using your past reviews and our Insights Report powered by IBM Watson to identify some of the biggest contributors to your reputation. These call-outs in the Impact section of the report can identify keywords you likely want to create a tag for and track.

While tags have a ton of operational value for analyzing and reporting on key topics and themes in your customer experience and reputation, most gravitate to the marketing power of tags.

Reputation Builder is the only reputation management tool that allows you to display reviews on a website that have been organized by a tag. Our Tag Widget allows you to bring reviews, ratings, content, and conversion to any page on your website focused on a service, topic or team member. It’s digital marketing gold.

Tag Widgets are a big part of our 5X Review Strategy and here are a few examples of tags and tag widgets in use.

For Clean Juice, an organic juice bar, this allows us to then display all of their reviews mentioning a juice cleanse on their service page dedicated to cleanses.

For Barbara Oliver Jewelry, the tag widget allows here to display her reviews mentioning “engagement rings” and variations on her page dedicated to custom engagement rings.

Our last example is for a real estate broker that uses tagging to segment reviews per each of their realtors. Jump Realty can now parse reviews to each agent’s bio page. Realtor Suzy Cui now has reviews from her clients displayed on her page.

Tags can also be used to call-out a review that you would want to generate into a Social Sharing image in Reputation Builder to post to your social media accounts.

Adding tags to a review is just as flexible with the ability to add a tag when you add a customer when you read a review and even for this to be done by our platform automatically (magic!). This can be done in a number of different ways.

You can add a tag right from the start when you add your customer to Reputation Builder for a review request. This is most often used when you already have a segmentation in mind like the service they received, product used or staff member worked with.

The example below shows how to add a tag when manually adding a customer to Reputation Builder.

Once in a location, select Requests > Add Customer > And click the “+” for Add Tags to this Customer

Once you have clicked the “+” to add a tag or tags to thus customer you have the option to create a new tag or select from your existing tags. There are no limits to the number of tags a review can have.

Type in your new tag or select from your existing tags

You can also add tags when you are uploading a CSV or Excel spreadsheet using our “Import Customers” feature.

Select “Request” > Import Customers > then select your file. You must have a column with your tag information in the spreadsheet.

When you file has been imported you must review your column assignments to match the info type to the field in Reputation Builder it will populate. Make sure you select “tags” for the column you want to apply tags for. In our example below we are tagging the team member the customer worked with.

Find the column that your tag information is in and assign it using the “Belongs to” drop down by selecting “Tags”

Once a customer has left a direct 1st-party review you can add a tag(s) to that review in their Customer Profile. This allows you to see their rating and content and determine how it should be tagged based on your tag strategy.

This gives you ease and flexibility to tag the review for benefits in analyzing, filtering, reporting and marketing.

Our example below shows that once in the Customer Profile for your specific customer you can add tags to each review in their Feedback History. In our example for a car wash we are tagging the review as it talked about “Service” and mentioned a specific product, the “Platinum” wash. One reason we would want to tag the product is to later stream all reviews about the Platinum wash to a page on the website about that product.

Manually add tags to a 1st-part review in the customer profile screen once a review has been given.

Note: You can also remove or delete a tag from a 1st-party review in the Customer Profile by clicking on the “X” after the text in the tag.

Now that you have a better understanding of the benefits of tags, how to use them and how to create them, I have even better news. You can let Reputation Builder do all of this work for you!

Auto-tagging allows you to build keyword lists that trigger the applying of a tag once read in the review content. This is a huge efficiency win and allows you to create automated work flows that start with how you add customers to Reputation Builder for review requests, get reviews, tag the reviews and then display them on your website. It all can happen without you lifting a finger once set-up.

An additional benefit is that auto-tagging works for all of your reviews, both 1st-party and 3rd-party. So you can apply tags to your Google reviews, Facebook recommendations, and any other review sites you are monitoring.

You can access the auto-tagging feature two different ways, from the left side menu or from the Customer Activity page.

Clicking either of these entry points will bring you to where you can set-up your first auto-tag.

For this example I will be creating a “Communication” tag to call out how this painting business does on their calls, emails and follow-up with customers. This will allow the business to track communication as a key metric and also use a Tag Widget to show off their great reviews on communication on their website to separate them from competitors. Anyone working with a home services company knows that good communication can be very hard to find.

Step 1 of 3, click “Add New Tag” and then give a name to your tag. in our example it’s Communication.

Create a new tag for Auto-tagging and then add the name of your tag.

Step 2 of 3, add in the keywords you want to trigger the tag. We automatically add in the same term used for the tag as an exact match.

Pro tip: I usually will write down my tag name, then scan the history of reviews in Reputation Builder and look for the keywords/terms in the reviews that I want to have this tag apply for. Even though the example account only has 24 reviews I can quickly pick out reviews talking about phone calls, emails, and responsiveness. I can also add terms I hope to see in future review content, not just ones that exist. You can always go back and add or edit these. Our system will detect plurals as well so no need to add a singular and a plural version.

Add your keywords for auto-tag detection

Step 3 of 3, allows you to either start using auto-tagging moving forward or apply your new tag to all existing reviews. Turning this option “On” will let our system review your past 10, 50, 100 or 500 reviews and apply your newly created tag. This is a great way to summarize and leverage your existing history of reviews if you have them.

Apply auto-tagging to your history of reviews

Now your tag is ready to run. If you are asking the platform to tag your historical reviews you will need to allow up to 24 hours for this process to run.

Your new tag now appears in the tag list with it’s keywords.

Once you have created your tags you can go back and add, delete, or edit their keywords at any time by clicking the tag name or the “Manage” button. Below is an example of your tag once set-up in auto-tagging and how you can add a new keyword, remove one or edit it.

Once a tag is created, you can add, delete or edit keywords

This deep dive on tags should have clearly outlined the infinite power and value that a tag strategy can give your business or provide for your clients. This is just one example of how Reputation Builder is about far more than getting reviews, it’s about using them to build a better business.

Tags can help you simplify how you analyze and report, it can provide direction to management and operations, and it can supercharge your content marketing, SEO, and conversion. It’s a customer experience and reputation management strategy and tactic all in one.

We’d love to hear about your use and success with tags and auto-tagging, especially if this article gave you the roadmap on how to make it all happen.