Reputation Lands $150 Million to Power Reputation Experience Management
Reputation announced Tuesday morning that it has raised $150 million in fresh funding to power what it calls reputation experience management, or RXM.
Marlin Equity Partners led the round, which Reputation told Street Fight it will use to further invest in CX management, expand operations in EMEA, and fund R&D.
In calling itself an RXM platform, Reputation is attempting to stake out new territory in reputation management, which typically refers to software that helps companies monitor online feedback, such as reviews, respond to that feedback, and take action based on customer response data to improve their reputations. Here’s how Reputation explains RXM:
“Many parts of the customer journey, such as reputation management, customer experience and digital experience, have remained siloed up until now,” said Joe Fuca, CEO of Reputation. “With a customizable product lineup, Reputation has brought the three related industries together to create what we refer to as the Reputation Experience Management (RXM) platform. RXM adds an additional layer of value by providing actionable insights to improve performance, leading to an increase in a customer’s bottom line. On top of that, Reputation uses advanced AI capabilities and access to vast amounts of data to help improve the CX industry as a whole.”
A case study: how RXM works
To illustrate what it can do, Reputation told Street Fight it had worked with a national retailer that wanted a way to centralize and act on customer feedback from local surveys without losing the granularity and localization that comes with decentralized control. In addition to streaming “survey results to individual location landing pages to boost local search rankings,” Reputation said it offered the company the following:
- A survey builder with customization for each retail location
- Integration between surveys and CRM
- Analytics at the local level, so each retail location could better understand customer sentiment and compare it to that at the overall organizational level
- Survey templates to allow locations to request and stream online reviews and survey results to local web pages
“As a result, not only did the number of completed surveys rise from 11,600 to 45,300, but the number of positive reviews increased by 67%,” Reputation claimed. “Local web traffic and review volume increased, and the retailer’s average star rating rose from 3.2 to 3.8 in a year.”
Of course, none of this necessarily rises above the level of reputation management — the question is more whether businesses actually use the insights derived from reputation management to improve CX instead of simply boosting their reputations. But with $150 million in its coffers, Reputation will be well positioned to make the case for RXM, and it would be unsurprising, given recent acquisitions in the space, if the company went shopping, either, to consolidate its position in the market.
