In this world of social media, just as it is feasible for ingenious brand owners to promote their brand using the power of the internet and the social media, so it is now entirely feasible for your reputation to be damaged by the same social media. This why Tweets about certain brands will solicit a fast reaction and a correction. A recent set of Tweets on Asda’s on-line store shows that they not only monitor Twitter for their brand, but take pro-active steps to contact people and to ensure satisfaction. NHS-Direct also monitor Twitter for negative comments and make an attempt to fix things – although a simple Twitter reply with a link to a generic comment web-page is not in the same league as Asda’s recent reaction. Similarly, other brand owners seem to be totally oblivious to the power of the web, including forums and Twitter.
If you type “Land-Rover Discovery 3” into Google and then go to the second site in the natural listings (www.disco3.co.uk/forum/) you will find a forum which, on 4th January 2010, included 1077 posts on faults and fixes for the Discovery 3 model and 398 posts in the same category on the recently launched Discovery 4 model. It may be that not all of these represent manufacturing faults, but would you buy an expensive car after reading this lot?
My point is simple. It is now a lot more important for brand-owners to be sensitive to customer opinions. They may conduct surveys; they may take the feedback from those surveys seriously. But, how many brand owners actively seek out dissatisfied customers? These are the dissatisfied customers who find it so easy to publish faults and foibles to the global internet audience.
People usually vote with their feet – and change to an alternative brand if they are unhappy. Unfortunately, some of our purchases fall in to the “too expensive to dump it and move on” category – especially in a recession. So we are forced to stick with brands we are unhappy with and to tell the world – damaging brands in the process.
Suggestions
- Make it your business to actively seek out unhappy customer comments in the social media world. Speak to your customers.
- Show them you care.
- Put things right – over and above the warranty if required.
- Do this before they build a huge following who are just waiting for the next public notice of some issue or problem. - Consider developing KPI’s on your brands appearances in social media with positive, neutral and negative comments.
- For something more structured - take a look at a post on Creating Customer Delight
- Or, read: Richard C. Whiteley, The Customer Driven Company, Perseus Books, ISBN 0-201-60813-8
So you never read any of the 570000 other post on the forum then at all the positive things and lots more
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking the trouble to comment Ray. And yes, I have read many of the other posts. The forum is a wonderful source of information on vehicle specifications and use of the car. It has saved me £100's of pounds in repair bills - just one example being maintenance of the automatic gearbox selector mechanism to cure a recurring problem. My point is that Land-Rover should be more pro-active in managing their reputation. In 2010, firms need a lot more than a loyal customer base to survive. They must attract new customers, or die - 10 years ago would anyone have predicted the end of Saab? In order to attract new customers, Land-Rover should be managing their reputation better - and that means managing existing customer experiences more effectively. If you read "The Customer Driven Company" by Richard Whiteley, he refers to best practice as "invest in customer complaints - resolving them".
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