These two videos review why your organization or business needs to be watching over social media, what its impact is, 3 major shifts in customer feedback and what you should do about it.
A text version of these videos can be found on as a guest post on Folkmedia.org. Read the rest of this entry »
Is Big Brother Watching You?According to Wikopedia, Big Brother is a fictional character in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In that novel, people were afraid that the ruling party (or government) would know everything about you and would would be watching you. Well that fear has come to reality but it isn’t the government that is watching us, it is everybody around us.
Almost everyone who had a cell phone has a camera in it, that can take pictures and movies. These pictures or movies can be posted to Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, or Youtube and be very embarrassing. Lately this has become very visible in the media as well. Read the rest of this entry »
Most Organizations measure customer satisfaction with surveys. They can be tracked, and measured and compared year over year, month over month, quarter over quarter. But what techniques are available to raise early warning flags?
It is common knowledge that dissatisfied customers will take their business elsewhere. But there are mitigating factors about how soon management will see the effects. If the customer is involved in a long term contract (such as 3 year cell phone contracts or car leases) or if the cost to change to something new is significant (such as moving to a new building or installing a new piece of hardware or software) customer defects may not take effect until sometime in the future, lulling management into thinking they don’t have a problem even when satisfactions data show low scores.
The customer satisfaction best practices are to look at predictor metrics, prevention programs and measure social media, blogs and complaint sites. Read the rest of this entry »
Better Business Bureau has recently released its list of the Top 10 Industries with the most customer complaints. One measure of customer satisfaction is the number of complaints received. Most companies measure service calls but not all measure complaints as a separate measurement, though a complaint is very different from a service call.
Normally a complaint is a measure of the failure of a service call or multiple calls. So measuring complaints is important because it can show where the service may be failing or where other parts of the organization are failing that are not covered by the service organization.
The Better Business Bureau measured both the number of complaints and the number of complaints that are resolved within 30 days. Here are the two tables ranked by volume of complaints (most to least) and followed by the more telling data: the percent of complaints resolved within 30 days (most to least). Read the rest of this entry »
Customer Satisfaction processes call for addressing issues with customers squarely and fairly. So far, Toyota has not done this well. Embarrassing evidence keeps surfacing and public relations efforts have limited success.
Toyota’s President Akio Toyoda addressed the US Congressional hearings this week but failed to satisfy the Congress and the Public about the remorse the company feels for the negative impacts of its actions (or lack of actions) . Toyota insists its acceleration problems are caused by mechanical problems. But the US Lawmakers and others believe it could be an electrical problem.
The US government has pressed Toyota to submit documents as it investigates how much about the current recall problems it knew in the past. The most damning evidence of a corporation looking the wrong way on Customer Satisfaction is the emergence of a presentation from July 6, 2009 called ‘”Wins for Toyota — Safety Group” part of which brags about negotiating a limited recall with the US government on Camry /ES models that saved Toyota $100 Million+. It also talks about an avoided investigation on Tacoma Rust (Tacoma’s are now being recalled, for a rust problem). Read the rest of this entry »
The Ca
nadian Government has announced that the Budget Speech on Mar 4, 2010 will be tweeted to the public as it is read in the Canadian House of Commons. This is announced on the Department of Finance Canada Website at http://bit.ly/bgskQZ. In an effort to communicate better with constituents (improve their customer satisfaction) in real time, the Finance Department will start its communications on Twitter with the budget speech. Wonder how they can do that?
There is an interesting piece of technology I wrote about earlier this Customer Satisfaction blog that allows you to put a Tweet on each page of a Powerpoint presentation and as the presenter (who has to be connected to the web) flips from one page to another, the Tweet from that page is sent out. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a Forbes article with a familiar story with an important customer service lesson: customer service personnel need sensitivity training in social media and policies they can use to fix real customer problems. In this story, the customer was unhappy with a product and unsuccessful with customer service to get the problem resolved, used social media, got management attention and satisfactory resolution.
The newsworthy part of this article is that the Customer Service representative and the Customer Service manager were warned that the customer had a million followers on Twitter and was going to use that media to complain. Their attitude from both was indifference. Perhaps the customer service personnel should have bid for some time and escalated within the organization. Or perhaps the customer service organization had no place to escalate the customer’s problem. Read the rest of this entry »
I have seen several questions on customer satisfaction forums about what is the right ‘metric’ for customer satisfaction that will predict future outcomes. Often this question comes up in respect to ’surveying’ customers. Is Overall Satisfaction the right measure; willingness to recommend; or repurchase intent?
Customer satisfaction measurements are a mosaic of possible metrics and the ones that should take priority should be the ones where the executives feel there is a need to improve.
Listening to Social Media, Blogs and complaint sites can give insight to executives to what the customers are most unhappy about and can be used to help focus. Read the rest of this entry »
Customer Satisfaction is meeting or exceeding expectations. Social Media can be used to show how your dealership satisfies customers and can add some new ‘expectations’ customers never knew they had. Here are some examples.
Facebook fan pages can be used to create a community with a car dealer’s customers. Community means that the customers can interact with the car dealership and also with each other. Car dealers can post information about the vehicles they have for sale, special events, community involvement and highlights of their employees.
Think of social media as making a dealership a more friendly place to come to, whether you are coming for a new car, a used car, or service. Available times for appointments can be available. The latest inventory can be shown on line, and the recently arrived ‘used cars’ can be highlighted as well. Read the rest of this entry »
The bad news continues for Toyota’s brands. Prius, Lexus, Sai, Camry and Tacoma recalls have been issued in the past week. And there is investigation going on about possible problems with the steering on newer Toyota Corollas. Customer Satisfaction with Toyota has certainly been impacted with this widespread quality problems. Some Toyota units in the US were named in a Racketeering lawsuit. Toyota shareholders have also seen a big drop (about 20%) in their share value since mid January when the most recent recalls started.
On Feb 9, 2010, a new recall have been announced on almost half a million Prius, Sai and Lexus HS250h hybrid models. In the ABC video below, Toyota’s reputation for quality, safety and honesty in dealing with its customers. The Prius was introduced last year as the ‘car of the future with its latest in engineering. It was also revealed that Toyota has known about the brake problem for several months. The video talks about dissatisfied Toyota customers in ‘rebellion’ over being ignored by Toyota for their break issues and uncontrolled acceleration problems with Toyota vehicles. Here’s the ABC video.
Crowdsourcing is a new term and a possibly a new emerging trend. The basic premise is to tap into the vast wisdom of the general (or specifically skilled) population to funnel the best ideas to the top and execute them. It is also being used in the Customer Service arena.
When I was at IBM, we called them user groups and they were local, often within the same city. Then bigger groups formed and held international meetings such as Guide, Share and Common. Today that function is happening in a worldwide basis and across many industries. User groups are now worldwide and users helping users. Some organizations are enabling and encouraging crowdsourcing Two recent two articles on my blog describe this trend. See Intuit’s implementation in Quickbooks and Turbotax in the article
and the Xbox Live Ambassadors in the article
Jeff Howe featured in this video is the author of the book “Crowdsourcing”. Read the rest of this entry »
