Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

BP’s Oil spill has put it in the spot light, mostly with negative publicity. BP has attempted to fight back with improved communications on the $20 Billion fund, a new leader and Gulf Coast Restoration organization, clean ups and preparations for hurricanes. It has prepared 4 videos on these subjects but then make them hard to find except on the BP site. Small changes in the company website to improve search engine optimization would help BP’s reputation management cause.

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.

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.

One of the techniques Toyota has used to try to minimize the customer satisfaction hit they took earlier this year is a new Social Media technique – Digg Dialoggs. Digg Dialoggs allows users of social bookmarking site Digg, to pick leaders they would like interviewed, then recommend questions they would like answered and have the top 10 questions (voted by users) asked of the leader by a Digg Correspondent. The top 10 questions asked of Jim Lentz, President and COO of Toyota US were a big surprise. Digg, Digg Dialoggs, the top 10 questions asked of Toyota US and the video of the interview itself are included in this article.

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..

Yelp, a web site, where consumers post positive or negative reviews of local businesses can be a boon to customer satisfaction, sales and new customer acquisition or it can be a real headache for a local business. The power of consumers is very evident in this new review site which boasts 30 Million users a month, and 10 Million reviews, mostly in the US, but also in Canada, UK and Ireland. This article describes Why Yelp is important, what Yelp is, how local business owners can use Yelp and what do to next if you are just getting started.

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.

Social media is causing customer satisfaction weaknesses to become very visible quickly. . The examples in this blog post are those where an employee or manager has used web tools improperly and caused embarrassment to their employers, causing press releases or statements to be issued with apologies and explanations. The lessons being learned by these examples, is that, every company needs to review what role the employees should be playing with respect to social media and external web sites and then ensure their employees are well trained on the company’s policies and their roles with respect to Social Media.

Google’s new universal commenting system called Sidewiki is about to cause a major change to customer satisfaction, marketing, product launches, and public relations. Any company or organization that has a web site is impacted. Every organization will need to develop a social media strategy and strengthen their customer satisfaction strategy.