MeasuredUp Customer Service and Small Business Marketing Blog » Complaints

Posts Tagged ‘Complaints’

 Leveraging customer review to manage your reputation online

Monday, October 11th, 2010

Undoubtedly, no single thing matters as much for increasing sales and engendering loyalty as building a great customer service brand. And considering the immediate and ubiquitous nature of the Internet—where details about a negative customer experience can spread like wildfire—it’s more important than ever for small business owners to join the conversation online and help to manage their company’s reputation.

Whether you like it or not, consumers are most likely talking about your business on the Internet. And if you’ve recently heard about a customer service problem at your business, it’s likely that you became aware of the situation in the same way that most consumers do: by finding a review about your company via a search engine.

So how can you be proactive about managing your reputation online? Let’s look at two ways:

1.

Increase the number of online reviews about your company. You can begin this process by asking your top customers to post a review about your business on customer review sites such as Yelp.com and MeasuredUp.com. By asking your top customers to post reviews, you’ll likely generate a number of complimentary reviews quickly and easily. These reviews will help to offset any existing negative reviews, help to increase your visibility on search engines, and help to attract potential customers who are searching for your products or services online.

When you come across a complimentary review about your business, you should add a quick “Thank You” in response, and mention that you appreciate the support of your customers.
2.

Respond to negative online reviews about your company. You can tackle this effort by having a staff member—who understands your company culture and brand—spend a few hours each week searching the Internet for unflattering reviews about your company. (Note: There are online tools available that can help you accomplish this.)

When there’s a comment field available in a review, the staff member should respond with some helpful and constructive content that shows that you care about providing good customer service. In addition, they should state that they are an employee of the company. The respondent should never pretend to be a consumer, because that deception will likely be discovered, and will likely produce even more uncomplimentary content.

The employee should also include a link to your website in the response, which can help to drive traffic back to your website.

The goal here is not to have only good reviews, because even some of the best companies have bad reviews written about them. The goal is to achieve an effective balance, and to make sure that you don’t allow uncontrolled rumors to spread online. You also want to demonstrate through association that your brand is focused on good customer service . . . and that you’ll take steps to improve it when you fall short.

By leveraging online reviews about your company in your favor, you can often have a greater impact on the purchasing intent of consumers—who are deciding what to buy and where to buy it—than even the best TV commercial or magazine ad can have.

Read the article here: www.web.com/blog/small-business-development/leveraging-customer-reviews-to-help-you-manage-your-reputation-online/

 Why Customer Service Is So Bad

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

By JAY GOLTZ

 

I don’t think many people would disagree that customer service is not what it used to be and not what it should be. Many people blame it on a particular generation, and others see it as just another example of the decline of civilization. I have another explanation. Actually, I have three explanations. Let’s start with health insurance.

Because of the high cost of health insurance, many companies have opted to hire a lot of part-time staff, which allows them to avoid having to offer benefits. This creates a problem: It is difficult enough to train full-time people. Having them there part-time and having a huge turnover makes it all the more difficult.

Meanwhile, in the retail world, pricing has gone mad. It used to be that stores would have four sales a year to get rid of stale or seasonal merchandise and to promote business. These days, stores have “crazy once in a lifetime sales” every two weeks. When you have manic pricing, up one day, down the next, it wreaks havoc on customer service. When the sale is on, you don’t have enough staff. When the sale is off, the staff stands around and complains about the slow business.

Read the entire article: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/why-customer-service-is-so-bad/

 Council: Customer Affinity Is New B2B Marketing Measure

Friday, January 25th, 2008
BACKED BY A MAJOR NEW study, the CMO Council is urging B2B companies to create marketing performance models based on “customer affinity,” a concept that the Council concludes is far more meaningful than “soft metrics” such as brand awareness/satisfaction or response rates to marketing campaigns.

 

The study, “Profitability from Customer Affinity,” was conducted in the B2B technology sector, but has far-reaching ramifications for many markets.

 

“We’re pushing to sensitize the marketplace to the reality that engagement and interactivity with customers is far more meaningful and valuable than just blasting out one campaign after another, or measuring communications effectiveness,” sums up CMO Council Executive Director Donovan Neale-May.

 

The study confirmed that customers rank brand perception low on the totem pole in terms of what drives their relationship and purchasing decisions, and the council believes that traditional brand measurements actually reinforce ineffective marketing practices and “severely limit the role and vision of the CMO.”

 

In contrast, companies’ ability to develop strong interaction/ engagement with customers has “enormous impact” on their returns, and may actually be the most essential competitive advantage and determinant of their overall business performance in the years ahead, stresses Neale-May.

 

What exactly is customer affinity? It is a set of disciplines that includes brand awareness, trust and credibility, but goes beyond “surface metrics” like customer satisfaction, loyalty or advocacy. Affinity “digs deeper into critical aspects of the customer relationship and lifecycle experience,” including product relevance, value-added services, co-innovation, responsiveness, business practices and policies, problem resolution, value of customer interactions, clarity and resonance of messaging, customer knowledge, communications quality and consistency, explains the report. Marketers, it stresses, “need to play a significant role in defining, orchestrating and activating all of the factors impacting customer affinity.”

 

B2B technology was chosen as the focus of the initial affinity study because of its size and importance (annual expenditures of $488.5 billion in the U.S. and $1.5 trillion worldwide) and its unique, complex set of customer relationship challenges, explains Neale-May. A major deliverable was the Customer Affinity Index (CAI), which measures how leading technology companies stack up in terms of customer equity and attachment.

 

However, the Council views this study as a first step. Going forward, it plans to continue to research what drives customer affinity, hone metrics and use the methodology created for the tech sector to conduct similar studies in a number of markets, including financial services, Neale-May reports. The ultimate goal: Give companies within a market the ability to create their own, hard performance metrics based on the customer affinity model.

 

In the tech market, the Council conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative research over a six-month period with senior-level IT buyers/specifiers; channel solution providers; marketers with IT manufacturers/vendors; and customer relationship, service and call-center executives.

 

The findings revealed significant disconnects between customer and vendor priorities and communications. For starters, contrary to traditional marketer perceptions, branding isn’t all that important to customers. Customers’ top five factors in evaluating and selecting a tech vendor are level of competency, caliber of service and support, level of commitment, compatibility with existing infrastructure and quality of thinking-again, reaffirming the alignment theme. Brand perception/promise ranked in the bottom five responses.

 

Customers and vendors/channel partners also disagree about what it means to be “customer-centric.” Customers say that the most important factor is strategic alignment of the vendor’s organization with the customer. Meanwhile, alignment is “neither a top priority nor a real competency” among vendors/channel partners, concluded the researchers.

 

Over half (52%) of customers said that “organizational, operational and cultural alignment around the customer” best characterize a customer-centric company, compared with just 40% of marketers and 35% of channel partners.

 

No shock, then, that only 21% of vendor marketers themselves, and just 3% of channel partners, view vendors as being “extremely well-aligned” with the end-use customer.

 

More of the telling data:

* 56% of vendors perceive themselves as being “extremely customer-centric,” but only 12% of customers agree. In fact, fewer than half (47%) rank vendors as moderately customer-centric, although 65% rank channel partners as falling in this category.

* 85% of vendors believe they’re getting better at responding to customer needs, but 45% of customers disagree (and 41% don’t view channel partners as getting better at responding).

* 52% of customers described their relationships with vendors as “dependent and captive,” “struggling for common ground” or “combative and adversarial,” and 45% described their relationships with channel partners in the same terms.

* Customers and vendors by and large agree on the importance of co-innovation and collaboration in product and services development and decision-making, but they differ somewhat regarding which co-innovation factors are most important.

Customers’ top three factors are help desk and customer support center feedback channels, field technician and sales engineer visits, and input sessions around new-product road maps. Vendors’ top three are executive visits and interactions, the help desk/customer support channels, and beta visits and interactions.

Karlene Lukovitz can be reached at klukovitz@klmedialink.com.

 Companies can take the free Measuredup Pledge and build brand

Friday, January 4th, 2008

Welcome Companies and Business owners.

Take the Measuredup Pledge.  This is a program we have developed to help forward thinking companies demonstrate their commitment to improving Customer Service and making customers happy.

If you are interested in promoting the Pledge to your customers then please download the Measuredup logo and Pledge from Measuredup.com.

It is free to companies and makes a powerful statement that might just differentiate you from your no good competitors.

In this world of fragmenting media and online marketing its harder then ever to market to your audience and Customer Service is more important then ever in building your brand.  Show your consumers you care about them, are not afraid to put your brand where your mouth is and are committed to improving your Customer Service.

The Customer Service Pledge:

This company cares about our customers.

We want them to be happy and understand that without them we are not in business.

We know we can’t always be perfect and that some consumers will be angry sometimes, but we are committed to improving our Customer Service and making sure our employees always respect the customer.  In this way we will increase brand loyalty, word of mouth and repeat business.

By placing the Measuredup.com logo on our website we are supporting the Measuredup.com Customer Service Pledge to focus on making the consumer happy and to improving our customer service.

We believe the customer is always right.

We are so committed to Customer Service that we want to hear from you if your problem has not been addressed and we encourage you to submit customer service reviews to our company or to www.Measuredup.com

We look forward to making you a happy customer.

Download the free Measuredup.com logo and company pledge from Measuredup.

 How to get to a real person when trying to reach a company

Friday, January 4th, 2008

We have all tried calling companies to complain or ask questions only to be put into endless electronic prompts or messages that lead nowhere as we get more and more frustrated.

All we want is to speak to someone and then the issue would eaily and quickly be resolved.

But how do you get a real person on the phone.

Here are the best ways to do it:

- Do not answer the prompts.  Simply wait for a person to get on the line.  Many times these electronic systems do not know what to do when no one presses any keys and then they transfer you to a person.

- Simply keep pressing the number zero while at the same time saying Customer Service over and over again.  This will often transfer you to a person.

If neither of these works then keep along with the electronic system looking for an opportunity to connect to a real person.

Once you get a real person, right away ask them their name and extension and give them your number in case you get disconnected.  This creates a dialog and makes it more accountable forcing the rep to pay attention and be professional.  They do not want to get into trouble.

One other thing you can do with companies that really try to give you the runaround and avoid putting on a real customer service person is to write a review about them on www.Measuredup.com  It is free and easy to do.

When you do this you are telling other Measuredup users and consumers about the issue and your review is indexed on Measuredup and on search engines where other people will find them when searching for a company.  Doing this forces companies to pay more attention to you, revise their customer service and do a better job of interaction with consumers. Measuredup is a great way to complain or praise a company and their customer service in a public forum where others can read about the issue and make their own comments.

Bookmark/Share this page

This page is under construction.
It will be up and running soon with new features to make you smile more.
Thanks,
The MeasuredUp Team