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 »
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 »
Photo by Jason Wieler
An unbelievable scenario is percolating between Toronto, Canada transit riders and the Toronto Transit Commission workers resulting in a social media battle between riders and unionized workers. Add in a sex scandal by the chairman of the Toronto Transit Commission and you have the makings of a customer satisfaction twitstorm.
It started in late 2009 with an announced fare increase, coming in the new year. Toronto transit sells metal tokens as tickets as they have machines that accept the tokens at entrances to minimize staffing requirements. Tokens could be bought in groupings of 5 or 10, that provided a small discount on the cash fare price. With the announcement of a fare increase, well in advance of the date when the increase would become effective, people began hoarding tokens. The Toronto Transit commission aggravated riders by running out of tokens and forcing everyone who didn’t have one to pay a higher cash fare. This did not sit well with consumers.
One consumer, Jason Weiler, armed with a cell phone camera snapped a picture of a transit ticket collector asleep at his post around 9:45 pm. The picture went viral. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s an interesting video about Dell and their attitude towards Social Media and how they are going from Dell Hell to Dell Swell. It’s a bit dated but the messages are very interesting. Jeremia Owyang, Partner Customer Strategy at Altimeter Group interviews Bob Pearson, Communications and Conversations at Dell.
1. Dell uses Social Media to gather product requirements. Customers often tell the support or service organization what product enhancements they would like to see, but often, the service organization is not equipped to take this information and pass it along to the product developers. Dell is using Social Media to do this.
2. Customers would like to be ‘notified’ of topics of interest to them. In the example in the video, Dell talks about selling $1B in used, refurbished PCs and having fans sign up to hear about the latest ‘deal’ through social media. Read the rest of this entry »
Here are two entertaining videos about Social Media and its impact based on the book Socialnomics. There are a few gems about customer satisfaction.
1. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, any time. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences.
2. 34% of Bloggers ( there are 200,000,000 bl0gs) post opinions about products and brands. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? (Do you even know?)
3. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, only 14% trust advertisements. (There is a perception that a Business to Business buy is just a consumer with someone else paying the bill.).
4. Social Media isn’t a fad, it is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Read the rest of this entry »
