Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

More and more organizations are embracing Social Media as an add on to their existing customer service strategies. Gatwick airport is a recent example.
London Gatwick Airport has recently implemented a Twitter account @Gatwick_airport to receive feedback from travelers. According to Samantha Holgate, the Head of Airport Communications, “…the instantaneous nature of Twitter means that a lot of problems or concerns will be brought to our attention quickly. Problems and concerns that we will ideally be able to do something about.” A prominent sign appears next to the Check Information screen announcing the Twitter address.

Here’s an excellent recent overview video on Social Media statistics. It is oriented towards executives and marketing departments. But there are lessons for Customer Satisfaction, customer service and public relations professionals as well.

Social Media is changing the customer service discipline in many ways. We are now seeing the emergence of Certification courses to ensure customer service personnel have the right skills to engage in Social Media activities on behalf of their organization. There is an implied assumption that the organizations has a strategy and policies to deal with social media. Those policies needs to be communicated as well.

In my years as an Executive at IBM, one of the key factors that affected Customer Satisfaction was the existence of a Technical Sales Organization. A technical sales organization is different from customer service. Customer service gets called after the product is purchased and being used. Technical sales are involved in the sales process before the customer buys. In fact, Technical sales is often a key element of the sales decision process. The Technical Sales organization is a key factor in ensuring customers will be satisfied after the implementation is completed.

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.

It appears that a standard is starting to form in the world of Social Media. Twitter seems to be the social media vehicle of choice for handling complaints, and squeaky wheels while Facebook is for cheery news, fans, and brand boosters. See specific corporate examples: AT&T, McDonalds, Microsoft and Vodaphone.

One of the key customer satisfaction techniques is the need to provide front line employees with the ability to respond to customer situations quickly without the need to ‘ask for permission’. In his book ‘The little BIG Things’ Tom Peters asked managers if they encourage managers to celebrate successful use of this technique.

In Tom Peters’ book, ‘The Little BIG Things’, one chapter deals with a request from Stamford University Graduate School of business that was bungled due to lack of attention to detail. It is an important customer satisfaction lesson. The Devil is in the details.

Tom Peter’s book, The Little BIG Things, 163 ways to pursue Excellence starts in the first chapter with an excellent customer satisfaction story related to restaurants. It isn’t the food, the service or the friendliness of the staff that brings him back over and over again. The key factor is surprising. It makes us all realize that we really need to know what our customers value.