Customer Satisfaction and Reputation Management

BP’s Oil spill has put it in the spot light, mostly with negative publicity. BP has attempted to fight back with improved communications on the $20 Billion fund, a new leader and Gulf Coast Restoration organization, clean ups and preparations for hurricanes. It has prepared 4 videos on these subjects but then make them hard to find except on the BP site. Small changes in the company website to improve search engine optimization would help BP’s reputation management cause.

There seems to be an ever growing list of Complaint Aggregators that capture complaints about your products or services on their sites. Trying to keep up with these ever widening set of sites is a challenge for many organizations and needs to be part of any customer satisfaction and complaint management strategies. Check 11 aggregator sites in this blog post.

Reputation Management firms are often SEO (Search Engine Optimization) specialists who move negative comments off the front page of search engines. Some of the techniques include, raising the rank of the sites below the negative entry by adding favorable comments, using social bookmarking such as Digg, Delicious and others. Creating new subdomain sites on your site also may add more positive entries to the front page of Google. It is far better to over deliver and under promise to prevent the need to use reputation management SEO techniques.

Nestle is undergoing criticism from Greenpeace for its use of Palm Oil in its products on the grounds that it damages the environment. It has tried to publicize its position and action plans. Nestle has used a Facebook Fan Page with over 92,000 fans as one of its vehicles of communication but the handling of the issue by the community manager on Facebook has become a Facebook Storm with customers and non customers. The dialogue from customers, fans and non fans has taken on a life of its own.

The Canadian Government has announced that the Budget Speech on Mar 4, 2010 will be tweeted to the public as it is read in the Canadian House of Commons. In an effort to communicate better with constituents (improve their customer satisfaction) in real time, the Finance Department will start its communications on Twitter with the budget speech. Wonder how they can do that? Will this be a trend with other governments?

I have seen several questions on customer satisfaction forums about what is the right ‘metric’ for customer satisfaction that will predict future outcomes. Often this question comes up in respect to ‘surveying’ customers . Is Overall Satisfaction the right measure; willingness to recommend; or repurchase intent?

I think customer satisfaction measurements are a mosaic of possible measurements and the ones that should take priority should be the ones where the executives feel there is a need to improve.

A volunteer network is trying to satisfy their customers (those in need in Haiti) by coordinating the movement of water and other supplies around Haiti using Twitter and a relatively new mapping software called Ushahidi, which allows text messages to be mapped by time and location. When buildings are destroyed and street signs are gone, volunteers don’t know where they are or how to get to the place they are supposed to deliver the supplies. Rachelle Houde from Montreal is part of a massive volunteer effort over coming that challenge. Read her story!

In a recent article by Inc titled 30 Tips for using Social Media in Your Business, there were seven were directly related to customer satisfaction processes and techniques.

Radian6, social media monitoring platform for marketing, communications, and customer support professionals, is sponsoring Twebinars (hour long audio interviews) to share how companies are using Social Media on a regular basis. The most recent Twebinar covered how Xbox is using Twitter to augment their customer service. This article covers some highlights of how Microsoft Xbox support team called the ‘Elite Tweet Fleet’ is using Twitter, how they are organized, what they measure, and how they are managed.

“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.