Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

There have been two bills that were created and going through the approval process in the US congress and senate, called SOPA and PIPA, that, if passed, would affect internet users worldwide. This story is an interesting one about how various groups of businesses competed for government attention, and how the internet based organizations enabled consumers to bring their dissatisfaction to the attention of US law makers and halt the progress of the two bills.

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.

The web has made possible the creation of sites where customers help out other customers, answering each others questions, without the direct involvement of the product owner. Is this a good thing? What are the pros and cons of this kind of support for customers?

Luna Park, a theme park in Sydney, Australia, has implemented an application that integrates smart phones, bar code readers, photo taking devices, Facebook and email to provide a real time feed of what users are doing at the theme park to their Facebook friends plus a summary of the day. It’s called My Experience. During the day, there are posts to your friends on what rides you are taking and a picture of you on a ride and a score on how ‘daring’ you are. What is this? It’s a testimonial for the theme park. Indirectly, the act of posting a stream of actions taken by users is providing their friends word of mouth feedback using Facebook that they are having fun and after the fact, that they had fun, at Luna Park. Or they can send an email to their friends with a summary. Great word of mouth!

There are organizations, such as JD Power that rate customer satisfaction and service for various industries and there are crowd sourcing sites such as Epinions and Yelp where users provide the ratings. STELLAService is an independent company that rates customer service for eStores in the US and provides offers ‘web based badges’ or ‘seals of approval’ for quality customer service. They claim to have the most robust evaluation methodology assembled.

A recent survey by Unica, an IBM subsidiary called the State of Marketing 2011 – Unica’s Annual Survey of Marketers highlights the challenges marketers face in this rapidly changing business environment. Interactive Marketing is changing the methods of communicating with customers; it is ‘the meaningful alternative to imposing messages on customers that they no longer want to hear.’ Three types of media marketers need to be aware of include Earned Content, such as reviews, testimonials and references, all customer satisfaction elements. Customer satisfaction strategy needs to change to accommodate the new channels.

Foursquare is an interesting technology as it provides an organization a way to get users to promote your business to their friends and ultimately providing the benefits of testimonials and references AND it has a built in loyalty program. As a by product of its specials and its social media communication, Foursquare enhances word of mouth endorsement It is also a technique to entice prospects who are located nearby to come to your organization, through offering them specials on their mobile phones.

Customer testimonials and references are key indicators of customer satisfaction. They have the extra benefit of driving word of mouth advertising. A trend has evolved over the past few years where companies don’t gather the references and distribute them, the customers do. Organizations like Yelp helped strangers share reviews with each other. A more recent trend using sites like Facebook Places, Foursquare and Gowalla allow friends to share where they are visiting, creating a dynamic reference system.

IBM has made some recent announcements to help its customers with changing consumer demands based on new web and mobile techniques. As a result, IBM has announced the Smarter Commerce consulting practice and new software to measure social interaction to help their clients with these new abilities. As a by product of these rich information being gathered there should be an improvement not only in marketing information but in customer satisfaction data as well.

Crowd sourcing is a new web technology that allows organizations to tap web users to get feedback or have users help each other with problems they may have. Redesignme is a web service where organizations can solicit input from over 7000 creative users to improve a product, or its marketing, a corporate identity, a package design, or how to bring a product to market.