Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

Trust is one of the many factors that relate to customer satisfaction. When a customer does business with your organization, they have trusted you enough to do business with you. But trust can be broken in many ways, covered by The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey. Three key behaviors from this book that customer satisfaction professionals need to promote in their organizations are transparency, clarify expectations and right wrongs. A story of a major caught in a ‘real and apparent conflict of interest’ is an example of these principles.

Here’s an interesting video produced by Reachcast on how to handle customers who have posted a negative review online at sites like Yelp, Google maps, and other review sites.
Three major topics are discussed: 1. The Preparation before your respond, 2. The response itself, 3. Monitor and Follow up after the Response. A fourth step missing from the video is suggested.

In the Software business at IBM, some customers would expect Support to handle every issue they had, especially when they were paying for a support contract. Sometimes, the customer’s support request went beyond normal ‘Defect’ or ‘How To’ support. Customers wanted the product to have features that were not available in the product or needed training to use the product effectively.

Many organizations plan conversions or modifications that affect them internally and may make changes relevant to their customers. It should be obvious. When an organization makes a change that affects customers, the business should communicate with them about it. Be sure when creating a plan to modify some aspect of your organization, that you consider the customer’s perspective. Planning how the customer perceives the change will impact customer satisfaction with your products and services.

I was recently interviewed for an article in ChannelPro Magazine for an article called ‘Dealing with Disaster’. Channel Pro is dedicated to serving the business partner community ( VARs, integrators, custom system builders and Managed Service Providers serving the IT needs of Small and Medium Business. The article focuses on the need for channel partners to have a plan in place to deal with disasters of any kind and the steps to follow.

One of the best practices to maintain high levels of Customer Satisfaction is to prevent known problems. This post is the sequel to a prior post called Customer Satisfaction Tip: Notification of Known Problems. The earlier post dealt with why alerting customers to known problems was important and what some key elements of a notification system might be. This post covers the 5 steps needed to set up an Notification system.

One of the best practices for Customer Satisfaction is to prevent known problems. One technique to help with this objective is to create systems to notify customers of issues that might affect them, that are affecting them or that they should be aware of. This post covers why is it important to set up a notification system and what constitutes a notification system.

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..

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.

A study by IBM® Institute of Business Value of 30,000 US consumers in September and November 2008 revealed that, on average, consumers will drop allegiance to retailers after an average of 3.1 negative experiences. To promote customer satisafaction, eight key areas that affect the customer experiences are covered in this article.