Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

A consumer reaction to new marketing techniques being used through telemarketing, web marketing and even door to door marketing.: “A message to all those purveyors of marketing by aggravation, pestering, and annoyance: Pissing me off does not make me want to buy your product”. See other consumer reactions to companies trying to market their products using techniques that often have the opposite effect.

I recently called my mobile service provider about some new services I required. Within about an hour I received a text telling me I was going to receive a text survey and 4 more texts of one question each. My answers were to be texted back. All the texts (both the ones I received and the ones I sent were considered free texts by my mobile service provider. It is interesting that I had also called the same company as they were my phone service supplier as well. They also called me with an automated survey where I spoke the answers. The four questions were identical. Three were 3 multiple choice questions and one was open ended.

Customer Satisfaction is often measured by Customer Survey data. There are many market research companies that will create and run customer satisfaction surveys for you, based on your unique needs. There are 10 areas to consider when planning a customer satisfaction survey, from who to survey to how to provide feedback to customers about what you found and how you have changed based on customer feedback.

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.

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.

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.

A business acquaintance of mine decided to bring in some of his customers to provide testimonials and learn from their feedback. He was quite surprised at the reasons customers gave for their satisfaction. Yes the customers were satisfied with the service provided by the business. It met specifications. What surprised him was the comments from the customers about the caring they received and the follow up.There is more to measuring customer satisfaction than just meeting expectations. The human side touches the emotions and that sometimes has a huge impact on customer satisfaction.

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.

Have you ever had the problem that management and employees who are not on the front line, don’t focus on how they personally impact customer satisfaction? This is a common problem in large organizations. In my years at IBM, it was one of the key challenges. Often decisions made in departments removed from day to day interaction with customers set policies, designed systems or created products, services or promises that were not customer friendly or could not be implemented in the real world. Here are some tips to get buy in and focus internally.

According to an article in National Journal titled Obama Calls for ‘Customer Service’ Improvements in Federal Agencies, each US government agency is now charged with the mission to improve user experiences. Each agency has to develop a plan within 180 days. They also have to initiate at least one project that uses technology to improve customer experiences and they have to solicit feedback for ongoing continuous improvement.