Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

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.

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.

Toyota has suffered several black eyes in the news, a massive recall in the US and subsequently in Canada of Toyota and Lexus cars and light trucks to fix an accelerator pedal problem, a recall of Tundrea Pickup trucks in the US because of excessive rust on the frames and 6 Highlanders with ‘immobilizer technology’ stolen in a single night in one neighborhood in Toronto.

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.

On April 13, 2009, two employees of a franchise of Domino Pizza in Conover, N.C. shot a video of themselves performing unsavory and unhygienic acts while preparing food, and then posted the video on YouTube. (The video has since been removed from YouTube) Within two days, the video was seen by more than a million YouTube viewers and generated more than 300,000 comments, significantly impacting Domino’s customer satisfaction and reputation. Within 2 days, the CIO of Domino posted its own Youtube video apologizing and reversed Domino’s bad reputation.