Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

Pownum is a complaint aggregator located in Northhampton, England. They have some interesting twists in their value proposition, that differentiates them from other complaint sites and encourage consumers to enter complaints and reviews on their site as opposed to other complaint aggregators..

Get Satisfaction is a Complaint Aggregator, one of many showing up on the web. Some companies use them as their ‘complaint site’, or monitor the comments, questions and customer service. But other organizations do not know about them nor use them as their official site. 37Signals, a Software organization, recently took Get Satisfaction to task for the lack of transparency. The Get Satisfaction site does not make it ‘evident’ to the user that they may not be on the organization’s official web site.

There seems to be an ever growing list of Complaint Aggregators that capture complaints about your products or services on their sites. Trying to keep up with these ever widening set of sites is a challenge for many organizations and needs to be part of any customer satisfaction and complaint management strategies. Check 11 aggregator sites in this blog post.

Bravo for the US Government Department of Transportation for imposing new passenger protection rules on Airlines with real teeth fines for failing to comply. New rules include the 3 hour Tarmac Rule (US Domestic Flights), provisions for international flights, fines for chronically late or canceled flights, and a requirement to publish the Airline’s complaint process prominently, a requirement to document the Airline’s customer service plan and report back to the DOT after self auditing. Passengers have a way to report non-compliance.

Six topics dominated the feedback from a reader survey on the Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management blog. Tied for first place were “Customer Satisfaction Strategy and Implementation” and “Best Practices from Other Organizations’. Read the full list in this article.

IBM’s Complaint Process begins with the company committed to a common definition of a complaint: any dissatisfaction with a product, or process. This article covers IBM’s complaint and critical situation process, roles and responsibilities and management system. IBM’s complaint and critical situation process continues to be a key factor in maintaining its high levels of customer satisfaction.

Lack of senior management attention and commitment is often the main reason for customer service problems in many organizations. Front line customer service personnel are not inherently lazy, or insensitive. Customer service personnel are put in a position where they are unable to respond to customers the way they would like to, due to policies set by upper management. Failure to resolve realistic customers issues given today’s Web technology is fool hardy. Over and over again customers have shown their ability to embarrass large organizations with on line complaints.

Sometimes the best laid plans don’t work out right. There are lessons to be learned, especially from failures. A transit union in Toronto met with the public to address rider dissatisfaction. The union organized the meeting but refused to allow the transit authorities to answer questions from the public. The transit authority was relegated to having their own meeting at some future time. So while the concept of a public forum was a good idea, the execution failed. All parties representing an organization need to work together to resolve customer satisfaction issues.

Yelp, a location sharing service has announced changes to its practices due to customer complaints! This is ironic because Yelp is supposed to gather complaints and compliments from users about local small businesses. Yelp sold advertising on its site to small business owners but some small businesses called the advertising offering extortion. Several class action suits have force Yelp to make some changes to it policies. The article covers the existing ‘user review’ filtering process and the changes in policies caused by local business outrage.

Faced with rider discontent, the Toronto Transit Commission and the local Union representing Transit workers have announced 3 public Meetings called ‘Let’s Talk – TTC Riders and Workers’ so each side can air their issues and be heard. For those unable to attend the meetings in person, they will be broadcast over a local TV station and on the union’s website. Public Forums are a new technique emerging where public institutions and users can engage to understand each others perspective and try to resolve customer satisfaction issues..