Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

IBM has recently announced new software portfolio called IBM Customer Experience Suite. According to Fast Company in an article called Why IBM could be bigger than Facebook in Social Media , this software announcement is a clear indication that social media has changed the business landscape. However, a key tool and process does not seem to be part of IBM’s approach.

One of THE most ignored best practices in Customer Satisfaction strategies is to share with your customers that you heard their complaints and have taken action to minimize or alleviate the concerns that the customer should have noticed. This article covers how Dell Computers is providing feedback to customers on the improvements they are making.

In this blog, I have written about how important social media is and examples of how companies have been publicly embarrassed by some of their actions (Pepsico, United, and BP). This post highlights 37 bad mistakes made by corporations since 2004, the problem they created and the impact on them.

Customers are having conversations about your brand on Facebook. If you have Facebook Fan pages, customers are writing on your wall. Some comments will be positive and some will be negative. Some customers will come to your fan page looking for support. How can your organization support them? Learn about one service I found to help.

Are Customer Service organizations starting to engage with customers using Facebook? It appears that they are. Texas Instruments, Thomas Cook, Vodaphone UK and Dell Computers are 4 examples.

Virgin Media Inc., a communications company with offerings in Broadband, TV, Phone and Mobile services for business and consumers in the UK, has an interesting Slideshare presentation on how they do Customer Service with Social Media.

I came across an interesting post from Gartner Group that had a surprising statistic on how many companies were using or planning to use Twitter as a supplement to their normal customer service. In his article titled “Twitter Jitters in Customer Service” Michael Moaz describes researching the Twitter usage of 250 customer service managers.

IBM is sponsoring a JAM session on Oct 10 – 12. 2010 where it pulls together input from people interested in a topics related to Customer Service. The jam is web based so anyone from around the world can join.

Customer service representatives, complaint managers and senior executives are often confronted by irate customers. When the interaction is in person or over the phone, there are techniques to calm the customer and get to the heart of the matter. Here are 7 steps I used at IBM when I handled critical customer complaints.