In today’s business landscape, your reputation is everything – and customers play a pivotal role in shaping it. In the digital age, where every review can make or break a brand, protecting and enhancing your reputation has never been more essential.
The urgency of building and preserving reputations explains why customer experience experts await the annual Reputation Industry Benchmark Report from InMoment, a customer experience platform that specializes in data.
And the 2025 report, drawn from 31 million customer reviews on platforms such as Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, does not disappoint.
And the Reputation Winner Is…
Take the report’s most newsworthy finding: that the biggest customer experience success story is…the automotive industry. Along with the restaurant industry, automotive is “leading the pack,” the report said, by showing “the most consistent improvement in customer ratings,” and demonstrating increasingly “stable and reliable” customer experience.
Given that some car dealerships have reputational issues to overcome, with most consumers “(viewing) the car buying experience as less than ideal,” that may come as a surprise to some people.
Yet it also reflects the hard work the industry is doing to improve experience. As one McKinsey & Co. study noted, the key to automotive success is now to “put customer experience in the driver’s seat.”
Industries that need to work harder to echo the automotive success, the report said, include hospitality, insurance, and legal. All face lower ratings and slower responses to customer reviews year-over-year, with hospitality facing “the biggest challenges” with the sharpest declines in customer ratings.
Hospitality’s issues “could suggest growing inconsistencies in service delivery, potentially linked to cost pressures, staffing shortages, and changing customer expectations,” the report said.
Related: Shopping For A Car? Why The Auto Industry Is Losing Customers Despite Vehicle Shortages
Engage With Bad Reviews But Also Go Beyond
The report also makes a number of valuable broader points about how businesses can buttress their reputations, reflecting strong evidence that, according to one global advisory and advocacy firm, “reputation plays a pivotal role in shaping the success and growth of businesses, with numerous studies establishing a strong correlation between corporate reputation and financial performance.”
Key points in the report that are worth considering:
- Customer reviews are critical. They are also high stakes: The report notes that “success and failure can hinge on a single review; 94% of consumers will abandon a business over just one bad experience.”
- Respond, respond, respond: Businesses must acknowledge bad reviews – and move quickly to engage. “In today’s instant-gratification economy, delayed engagement is a death sentence for trust,” the report says. “Brands that act fast demonstrate they care, build trust, and encourage customers to come back.”
- Reviews are more than just ratings: The report calls them “real-time business intelligence” that ‘shape your online brand image, providing social proof, enhancing your reputation, and delivering real-time customer insights.” The report recommends that brands use the “valuable experience insights” gained from a steady stream of reviews to “drive operational improvements.”
- Be proactive. Businesses should go far beyond just reacting to reviews: They should constantly focus on customer experience, which will lead to more positive reviews. “Industries that proactively manage their reputation—by monitoring, asking, and responding to reviews quickly and consistently—see the greatest success,” the report said. “Conversely, brands that lag risk alienating customers and losing market share.”
- Even being proactive isn’t enough. Brands should use the feedback gained in reviews to upgrade their online presentations, adding content such as owner-uploaded and customer-uploaded photos to drive engagement. “The strongest brands aren’t just responding to reviews quickly,” the report concluded, “they’re optimizing their entire online presence.”
Focus on Customer Experience From the Start
Here are some steps brands can take to improve their reputation – and perform better in the report:
- Reviews, at least good ones, should not be a surprise because if you have focused sufficiently on customer experience in the first place, you should limit complaints. Avoid them with preventative maintenance – review your customer journey, identify potential pain points, and fix them in advance.
- As the report says, respond to complaints – rapidly – and make sure you resolve them.
- Follow up with reviewers good and bad: Make sure you consistently stay in touch with clients through good times so you know their customer experience desires – and can fulfill them.
- More broadly, track customer experience but in smarter ways those typical surveys that many customers skip. Ask customers open-ended questions – such as what did you like about this restaurant today and what could it have done better – to get their detailed thoughts. Then use those thoughts to improve experience.
One way to build a more permanent experience base: My CX Inspection Report, a comprehensive customer experience evaluation solution designed to help businesses enhance every aspect of their customer interactions.
You’ll receive a customized report that provides actionable insights on aspects of your CX (customer experience) that you should start, stop, and continue doing. All of this will help deliver exceptional customer experiences, drive loyalty and growth – and maintain the strong reputation that is essential to business success.
