Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

In Tom Peters’ book, The Little Big Things, 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence, Tom speaks of the value of listening to customers. Why should an organization listen, what is listening anyway, How to listen and What to Next are covered. According to Tom, the return on investment for Listening is higher than from any other single activity.

Companies who want to foster customer loyalty and sustain high levels of customer satisfaction have to move beyond simply meeting customer expectations to delighting the customer. Why is this so important? What exactly is ‘exceeding customer expectations’. Learn how your organization can exceed customer expectations and a road map to get started now.

When I was a customer satisfaction executive at IBM, we measured customer satisfaction with many aspects of the business. Customer surveys fell into three general categories: Transaction Satisfaction, Product Satisfaction and Relationship Satisfaction.

The recently released Social Media Revolution 2 video shows some very surprising statistics for Facebook and Youtube. Will traditional customer survey processes survive in the consumer market place?

Most Organizations measure customer satisfaction with surveys. They can be tracked, and measured and compared year over year, month over month, quarter over quarter. But what techniques are available to raise early warning flags? Three types of measurements can help: Predictor Metrics, Prevention Programs and Social media / Blogs / Complaint Sites.

I have seen several questions on customer satisfaction forums about what is the right ‘metric’ for customer satisfaction that will predict future outcomes. Often this question comes up in respect to ‘surveying’ customers . Is Overall Satisfaction the right measure; willingness to recommend; or repurchase intent?

I think customer satisfaction measurements are a mosaic of possible measurements and the ones that should take priority should be the ones where the executives feel there is a need to improve.

A new article I wrote, called Customer Satisfaction Management – Launch the New Year the Right Way, was recently published on eZine @rticles. Year End / Year Beginning actions that send the right message to employees need to be taking by various levels of management, from senior executive through middle management to first line management. This article covers why customer satisfaction advocacy is so important at year beginning, what customer satisfaction results to report, how to get maximum benefit from customer satisfaction results and what to do first.

This post contains two videos that review why your organization or business needs to be watching over social media, what its impact is, 3 major shifts in customer feedback and what you should do about it.

A recent article appeared in the NY Times: Mining the Web for Feelings not Facts, talks about a new science of searching the web for customer satisfaction data through mining of words, rather than survey data. For many businesses, online opinion has turned into a kind of virtual currency that can make or break a product in the marketplace says Alex Wright, the article’s author.” Typical customer satisfaction techniques of surveying customers to understand their level of satisfaction, while it may have some accuracy advantages, will be found to take too long in today’s instantaneous feedback environment.