Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

Apparently United Airlines has not learned its lesson from its very public fiasco where it damaged a passenger’s guitar (See United Breaks Guitars) and refused to accept culpability. A new, more troubling story has emerged about United Airlines losing a 10 year old girl who was using an ‘Unaccompanied Minor Service” offered by the airline for an extra $99.00. The girl was finally found and delivered to her destination but without her luggage, which arrived 3 days later. But not without putting her parents through hell.

Netflix customer satisfaction drop 14% according to a USA Today article called Survey: E-commerce customers generally satisfied. The article was featured on the front page of it’s Money Section . The American Customer Satisfaction Index released its e-Commerce report on Feb 21, 2012. According to the article, the Netflix result “.. is one of the biggest drops in the index’s history”

Tweet 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 [...]

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.

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.

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.

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.

How Social media are Amplifying Customer Outrage by author Chris Taylor shows examples of real life, on going, struggles between organizations and consumers. Some organizations are backing down from the public outrage. Some are not. Netflix responded with a change in their business model and a video of explanation. It remains to be seen if customers and Wall Street will react more positively.