Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

I came across an interesting article called Keeping Its Commitment To Its Customers: A Bank Does The Right Thing which I think makes an excellent point that companies often forget. At IBM we used to call it being a good Corporate Citizen. That used to mean helping out in the local community, sponsoring local events and supporting local initiatives where employees were involved. Webster Bank has an interesting approach to keeping its customers loyal through its program of Good Corporate Citizenship.

It is a well know fact that customer satisfaction can have significant impact on the business bottom line. So when we hear that a company goes bankrupt, we, as customer satisfaction professionals, should check how the company was perceived in the marketplace. According to a report, published in October, 2011, by Amplicate on US airlines, American Airlines was Americas most hated airline on social media for the previous 12 months.

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.

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.

If you ever needed a case study on why customer satisfaction is important and what havoc lack of customer satisfaction can have on a company, look no further than the recent situation with Netflix. It lost 800,000 subscribers in the United States in one quarter and over 25% of its stock price.

In an earlier post titled Netflix responds to customer social media outrage, Netflix addressed customer dissatisfaction with it’s a newly announced business model (and price increase) and the CEO produced a video explaining his actions. I ended my post with the idea that time will dictate if Netflix’s customers will accept their new business model. The results are in: Customer feedback has reversed Netflix decision to split its business in two in just a few weeks.

Trust is one of the many factors that relate to customer satisfaction. When a customer does business with your organization, they have trusted you enough to do business with you. But trust can be broken in many ways, covered by The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey. Three key behaviors from this book that customer satisfaction professionals need to promote in their organizations are transparency, clarify expectations and right wrongs. A story of a major caught in a ‘real and apparent conflict of interest’ is an example of these principles.

The customer is always right has been preached as the secret to customer satisfaction for many years. It many cases it is true and many companies need to swing the pendulum from their attitude of indifference or arrogance to be more compassionate and customer centric. But there are limits. Here are eight examples:

Location based apps can be used as a customer service tool, if you broaden what the term customer service means. Examples from Pepsi, Kraft Foods, Meijer, Mall Maps, Real Estate and Weather channel are covered in this post. Read the book The Third Screen by Chuck Martin for more examples.

Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, one of my favorite books and Dell Hell, has posted a story called An Amex Member no more about his recent experience with his American Express credit card and why he is no longer is a member. This is a classic case of misalignment between management and the service organization. This is a classic case of an organization that forgot what made it great and why customers were attracted to it.