Reputation.com, an Online Reputation Management (ORM) platform, accelerated its category momentum with the acquisition of SIM Partners, whose proven Directory Management technology deepens and augments Reputation.com’s own capabilities.
Reputation.com’s SaaS platform now helps organizations with dozens or thousands of locations and professionals provide robust and intuitive search capabilities for consumers, by powering find-a-doctor directories for healthcare, dealer locators for automotive, and location finders for retail, restaurants, hospitality, and other industries.
The stakes are high. Eighty-two percent of smartphone users turn to search to find local businesses according to Google, and 77 percent start their search for a healthcare provider online, according to Pew Research. Robust Directory Management tools are essential to ensure that websites and third-party directories are easily searchable and always reflect correct addresses, phone numbers, hours of operation and other critical information for every location, consistently, across any device.
Reputation.com’s acquisition of SIM Partners is important because it creates the first and only platform that covers the entire span of consumer experience for location-based enterprises on the web, by integrating:
- Business listings, directories and location finders
- Review management
- Customer surveys
- Operational analytics
- Social media management
- Mobile customer engagement
- A broad array of digital advertising services
“The customer experience begins before anyone walks in the door,” said Reputation.com Founder and Executive Chairman Michael Fertik. “And it persists long after the visit, across the web on social media and review sites. For too long, location-based enterprises and large healthcare organizations have cobbled together fragmented tools to manage customer experience on the web. The days of disconnected point solutions are done.”
The key benefits of Reputation.com Directory Management supported by the SIM Partners acquisition include:
- A Single Source of Truth:com Directory Management includes robust data management and automated workflows to deliver a unified, single source of truth for all location and professional data, eliminating the redundancies and inefficiencies of manual updates and multiple databases, and updating third party directories, maps and search engines like Google, Bing, Facebook, and Apple.
- An Intuitive Consumer Experience: com Directory Management includes a simple and intuitive directory search experience, helping consumers easily find the best locations and services for their needs. In healthcare, for example, consumers can search for a hospital, a practice, or a doctor using layman’s terms such as “hip pain” or “Crohn’s disease.” Matching is based on physicians’ known treatment history using insurance claims data. Consumers can select the best provider for them and easily schedule an appointment online.
- Improved Search Rankings: Directory Management, as part of a comprehensive Online Reputation Management platform, enables the publishing of business profiles with online reviews and surveys to local web pages — improving page rankings and driving more online appointments, phone calls and visits.
“We are delighted to join the team at Reputation.com,” said SIM Partners CEO Jon Schepke. “Being part of a broader technology stack will empower us to better service and support our customers going forward. Large multi-location enterprise brands and large healthcare systems require one single integrated platform.”
