Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

I am currently reading Engage, Revised and Updated: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web
by Brian Solis. In is book, Brian pointed out the threat posed by customer complaints that appear in Social Media, particularly Twitter. This brings up the whole issue of dealing with unscrupulous or aggressive competitors who use Social Media tools as a lever against you.

Small Business organizations often ask how they can gather customer insights without spending a fortune with consultants or research firms. This blog post covers 6 techniques and tools a small business can use to determine the satisfaction level of their customers.

IBM has published a study of over 1700 Chief Marketing Officers titled From Stretched to Strengthened, Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officer Study which highlights the changes the marketplace is going through and the need for businesses to adapt.

Seth Godin, author of over a dozen best seller books, wrote an article on unreasonable customers and why it is worthwhile to tolerate them. He also provides reasons to ‘fire’ a customer. For most organizations, the perspective is that the customer is always right. While that is true most of the time, it isn’t always. My list of when to say No to a customer is longer than those in Seth Godin’s post but they are similar.

Every organization goes through cycles, from year beginning, monthly and quarterly results and year end. As a new year approaches, one of the exercises every department goes through is planning for the year ahead. Customer Satisfaction strategies and processes need to be reviewed as well.The most important things to review are Management Strategies, Customer Expectations, Customer Feedback, Measurements and Targets and Management Reporting.

Conversocial has released two studies this year, one for the UK and another for the US, showing how well retailers are responding to customers on Social Media: Facebook in particular. According to the US study, Retailers did not respond to 65 percent of complaints and questions on their Facebook pages during a five-day period in September 2011.

Google is discontinuing Sidewiki. an annotation service that appears next to your website with comments from users. When Google Sidewiki was first announced in September 2009, it was intended as a way for Google users to share good and bad experiences with a company on the same page as the company’s website. This led to a backlash from organizations. Some web owners were upset that they no longer owned all the space on the browser when a customer accesses their webpages and two other major issues. Will Sidewiki be missed?