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.

Crowdsourcing is a new term and a possibly a new emerging trend. The basic premise is to tap into the vast wisdom of the general (or specifically skilled) population to funnel the best ideas to the top and execute them. It is also being used in the Customer Service arena.

Here’s an interesting video about Dell and their attitude towards Social Media and how they are going from Dell Hell to Dell Swell. Jeremia Owyang, Partner Customer Strategy at Altimeter Group interviews Bob Pearson, Communications and Conversations at Dell. Dell is using Social Media to gather product requirements, notify customers of deals, create platforms for customers to help each other and monitor social media for negatives comments. Watch the video.

Two videos on the impact of Social Media on business also highlight several gems about customer satisfaction.The data is from the book Socialnomics. 80% of Twitter usages is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, any time. Imagine what that means for bad experiences. 34% of Bloggers post opinions about products and brands. Do you like what they are saying about your brand. Do you even know? Watch these thought provoking videos. What is your organization doing?

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.

“The only way to put out a social media fire is with social media water,” says Ramon DeLeon, managing owner of 7 Chicago area pizza stores. A Domino Pizza Franchise owner uses an apology video to respond to a negative customer tweet. He also uses other interesting techniques to ensure his customers keep coming back.

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.

Free software is available to allow you to Tweet a message every time you change you slide in a Powerpoint Presentation and can create a Tweet cloud of audience reaction within your Powerpoint Presentation in real time. Customer Satisfaction feedback instantly!

1. It allows you to Tweet out words of your choice every time you change you slide.

2. You can show within your slide presentation, tweets people are making about your presentation.

David Carroll, a Canadian singer was flying from Halifax to Nebraska with a stop over in Chicago where he and other passengers watched in horror as United Airlines damaged his guitar. United was unresponsive after many attempts so he wrote a song, put it on Youtube. After 150,000 views, it was picked up by CNN and his song has been viewed by over 6 Million viewers on Youtube. United responded! In the meantime, United Airlines lost $120 Million of market capitalization.

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.