Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

Google’s new universal commenting system called Sidewiki is about to cause a major change to customer satisfaction, marketing, product launches, and public relations. Any company or organization that has a web site is impacted. Every organization will need to develop a social media strategy and strengthen their customer satisfaction strategy.

Social media is changing Customer Satisfaction processes. Some companies are doing well adapting to social media and others are finding it difficult to understand this new media and its impact. What is clear is that every company, at minimum, needs to be tracking what is being said about them on social media.This post will deal with some of the tools available to track your company’s name, product or products, your leaders and your brand OR your competitors and what is being said about them in social media. Use this data to proactively watch over your company or brand’s customer satisfaction.

The Best Service is No Service is a customer satisfaction ideal companies should strive for. Bill Price and David Jaffe have published an excellent book titled ‘The Best Service is No Service, helping companies find ways to reduce the need for customers to call them, while increasing customer satisfaction and reducing costs.

Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks provides a site where die hard users can exchange useful information with an interesting twist. It’s called QuickBooks Live Community and is only available for QuickBooks 2009 users. The net effect of providing this website for only these users is that a ‘volunteer army’ has been responding to each others questions and problems. Since introducing the site in October 2008, traffic on the site has tripled. 70% of the questions posted on the website at any point in time are answered by the volunteers of QuickBooks owners. Another interesting outcome is an increase in the sale of QuickBooks and an increase in marketshare and a reduction in the need for customer service staff.

Big Brands are starting to monitor and use Twitter to respond to dissatisfied customers. Many companies are creating new jobs such as Chief Bloggers, Directors of Digital Care, Customer Relationships Experts, Social Media Strategists, Heads of Social Media, and Corporate Twitterers. This article provides actual samples of digital conversations from large organizations found on Twitter. The most common trends are solving customer satisfaction problems and providing feedback on new products and services.

A recent article appeared in the NY Times: Mining the Web for Feelings not Facts, talks about a new science of searching the web for customer satisfaction data through mining of words, rather than survey data. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace says Alex Wright, the article’s author.” Typical customer satisfaction techniques of surveying customers to understand their level of satisfaction, while it may have some accuracy advantages, will be found to take too long in today’s instantaneous feedback environment.

On April 13, 2009, two employees of a franchise of Domino Pizza in Conover, N.C. shot a video of themselves performing unsavory and unhygienic acts while preparing food, and then posted the video on YouTube. (The video has since been removed from YouTube) Within two days, the video was seen by more than a million YouTube viewers and generated more than 300,000 comments, significantly impacting Domino’s customer satisfaction and reputation. Within 2 days, the CIO of Domino posted its own Youtube video apologizing and reversed Domino’s bad reputation.