Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

The bad news continues for Toyota’s brands. Prius, Lexus, Sai, Camry and Tacoma recalls have been issued in the past week. And there is investigation going on about possible problems with the steering on newer Toyota Corollas. Customer Satisfaction with Toyota has certainly been impacted with this widespread quality problems. Some Toyota units in the US were named in a Racketeering lawsuit. Toyota shareholders have also seen a big drop (about 20%) in their share value since mid January when the most recent recalls started.

Toyota’s customer satisfaction plans are not going well. The consumer expects Toyota to care about their safety and notify them of potential problems and fixes. They also expect swift action on issues, with a strong action plan to fix and some indication of how Toyota will ensure this kinds of problems will not recur in the future. Toyota is bungling these actions. The Toyota Prius and Lexus hybrid models are being added to Toyota’s quality woes with a possible defect in brakes. While Toyota claims to have fixed the problem in the new cars it is manufacturing it has no action plan for current affected Prius owners. Toytoa’s CEO apologizes. Also see the video of customer reactions.

Toyota is working hard to on reputation management, trying to appease customers and restore customer satisfaction and loyalty. Despite this effort multiple law suits and class action suits have been launched against Toyota. There is a perception that the current fix being implemented is not the real solution, that there are lingering problem with the acceleration system (computer, electronic and mechanical), and the lack of a brake-to-idle failsafe, which brings the engine to idle when both the throttle is in the open position and the break pedal is depressed. There is also concern that Toyota failed to exercise its duty of warn’ customers of a defect in a timely manner. Toyota is the middle of a major reputation management nightmare.

Toyota’s customer satisfaction woes continue to mount with recalls in Europe (estimated at 1.8 Million), China (it’s fifth recall in a year), Resale value drops to effectively zero as major wholesalers and used car dealers stop selling affected Toyotas. More car rental companies stop renting them. Some Ford models in China are affected too. US Congress has launched an investigation into how fast Toyota responded to known problems. Toyota has a reputation management problem!

Has the term Toyota Customer Satisfaction become an Oxymoron? Toyota’s recent quality problems on stuck gas pedals has now forced the company to halt car production AND SALES in North America of the affected models. The US government forced Toyota into this action. Car rental agencies, Toyota biggest customers, have pulled the affected Toyota models of out of service. The entire ecosystem, customers, leasing companies, insurance companies, shareholders are all negatively affected. There are recalls now in China and Europe. Should the affected Toyotas be allowed on the nation’s streets and highways? Can Toyota’s reputation ever recover?

If you want to monitor what is happening on the web with your brand, your organization, your executives or your name, the challenge is enormous. Some excellent data exists in a blog post called Internet 2009 in Numbers on a site called Pingdom. These numbers are staggering and surprising and highlights the need for monitoring.

1. 126 Million Blogs
2. More internet users in China and in Europe than in North America
3. 350 Million people on Facebook
4. 27.3 Million Tweets per Day in Nov 2009

Another Toyota recall announced on Jan 22, 2010, of 2.3 Million Toyota vehicles has further damaged Toyota’s Quality reputation. Toyota does not refer to an investigation that is ongoing in Southlake, Texas where 4 people died in a Toyota Avalon. The pedal acceleration problem could have been the cause. Sadly, one of the people who died was a business associate of mine at IBM. This article covers that investigation. It also contains a link to a video on the Tundra rust problem.

Here are the 10 Most Read Posts from 2009 about Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service and Social Media and Reputation Management with links to the articles.

Since my last post on Social Media Monitoring tools, I have come across tools and service offerings from a wide variety of companies. This article covers the ’services’ that provide social media monitoring as well as the kinds of social media data an organization might want to monitor.

TwitStorm is new term representing the conflagration that occurs when a nasty reputation-damaging tweet on Twitter, true or not gets retweeted, over and over again, to thousands. Using Social media and hashtags on Twitter, TwitStorms can spread like wildfire. A video on Tiger Woods’ impact on Nike has been retweeted over and over again. See the video “Tiger Woods will hurt Nike” on this site.