Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

Here’s an interesting video produced by Reachcast on how to handle customers who have posted a negative review online at sites like Yelp, Google maps, and other review sites.
Three major topics are discussed: 1. The Preparation before your respond, 2. The response itself, 3. Monitor and Follow up after the Response. A fourth step missing from the video is suggested.

The web has made possible the creation of sites where customers help out other customers, answering each others questions, without the direct involvement of the product owner. Is this a good thing? What are the pros and cons of this kind of support for customers?

Some products and services come with a fixed warranty or support period followed by paid support options. This is particularly well known in the computer software industry. Customers can become very irate when they call in with a problem and are told they have to pay for support. When I worked at IBM in Software, we had (and I believe IBM still has) an entitlement process when someone calls in for support. This post covers some of IBM’s preventive and reactive programs for paid support.

Gary Vaynerchuk has written an excellent book ‘The Thank You Economy’ on how social media is affecting business operations. Some of his points are relevant to customer satisfaction and the psychology of gaining and keeping customers. Seven tips are covered including one on how social media can be used as a no charge, always available focus group.

Gary Vaynerchuk has written an excellent book called ‘The Thank You Economy’ where he talks about the value of organizations engaging in social media in today’s environment. As I read over his book, he has some important customer satisfaction messages as well. He talks about the ‘way it was’, how the age of the automobile changed everything, the customer service center problem, the internet further isolating customers and finally how consumers have revolted and using social media, have taken back power from business.

Why Outsource Technical Support? There are many debates about outsourcing customer technical support and whether or not it is a good idea. Why would a company choose this path? Learn about the 5 reasons to outsource. Learn about what to outsource and the 5 things you should never outsource.

Luna Park, a theme park in Sydney, Australia, has implemented an application that integrates smart phones, bar code readers, photo taking devices, Facebook and email to provide a real time feed of what users are doing at the theme park to their Facebook friends plus a summary of the day. It’s called My Experience. During the day, there are posts to your friends on what rides you are taking and a picture of you on a ride and a score on how ‘daring’ you are. What is this? It’s a testimonial for the theme park. Indirectly, the act of posting a stream of actions taken by users is providing their friends word of mouth feedback using Facebook that they are having fun and after the fact, that they had fun, at Luna Park. Or they can send an email to their friends with a summary. Great word of mouth!

In this world of ‘always on’ communication platforms and mobile apps, here’s an interesting customer service offered by the local government in Rio de Janeiro. Citizens can report problems they find like broken traffic lights and potholes, etc by phone which is automated and answered 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. But in addition, a mobile phone application is available that allows for geo tagging and photos to be sent in as well.

Several companies have started using Facebook as their customer service platform. Examples are BT, Thomas Cook, Vodafone UK, Rosetta Stone, Journal of the Americas Chemical Society, and Dell amongst others. This post covers a new tool from Get Satisfaction in conjunction with Involver that provides the infrastructure to run a support service on Facebook. Read about the benefits of a service offering on Facebook, along with other helpful resources on this topic.