Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

An employee at a Papa John’s Franchise in New York made a career limiting move by entering a racial slur on a customer’s receipt. The customer posted the image of the receipt on Twitpic and submitted the following tweet.   The image posted on Twitpic shows the slur: ‘Lady Chinky Eyes’. 20, 000 Retweets later,  [...]

A company with a bad reputation on the web will have difficulty attracting top talent. In fact, it may have to settle for poor performers. A recent article in Impact Hiring Solutions Blog titled Your Reputation Can Impact Hiring Top Talent talks about a case of a company whose reputation was so bad that top talent refused to be interviewed for jobs with them.

Companies and individuals alike should be monitoring what is being said about them on the internet and social media. One of the tools that is available for personal use and that can be adapted for small business use is from Google and it is called ‘Me on the Web’. Google provides guidance on how to manage your identity including how to remove personal data from the web and how to remove a page from Google’s search results.

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.

I am currently reading Engage, Revised and Updated: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web
by Brian Solis. In is book, Brian pointed out the threat posed by customer complaints that appear in Social Media, particularly Twitter. This brings up the whole issue of dealing with unscrupulous or aggressive competitors who use Social Media tools as a lever against you.

IBM has published a study of over 1700 Chief Marketing Officers titled From Stretched to Strengthened, Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officer Study which highlights the changes the marketplace is going through and the need for businesses to adapt.

Conversocial has released two studies this year, one for the UK and another for the US, showing how well retailers are responding to customers on Social Media: Facebook in particular. According to the US study, Retailers did not respond to 65 percent of complaints and questions on their Facebook pages during a five-day period in September 2011.

Google is discontinuing Sidewiki. an annotation service that appears next to your website with comments from users. When Google Sidewiki was first announced in September 2009, it was intended as a way for Google users to share good and bad experiences with a company on the same page as the company’s website. This led to a backlash from organizations. Some web owners were upset that they no longer owned all the space on the browser when a customer accesses their webpages and two other major issues. Will Sidewiki be missed?

A new study has been released by Market Tools, a company specializing in Enterprise Feedback Management met with over 330 companies with revenues over $10 Million. 23 % of companies did customer service and support on Facebook but only 12% on Twitter. 5% didn’t think customer satisfaction was either extremely or very important. Read the full article to learn more.

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.