by Brenda Cordwell

(Reprinted from the September/October 2008 OPASTCO Roundtable magazine)

Your customers are talking about you behind your back.  They have always talked about your company - good and bad - to their friends, family and coworkers, but for years these conversations took place over the back fence or around the water cooler.  But these days, the Internet has changed those conversations dramatically.  What was a private discussion is now being broadcast to thousands (or millions) of people with a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse.

Your customers are blogging about their experiences with your company and your services, posting comments on forums and even "Twittering" about how you treat them.  In just a few minutes of searching, I found a particularly vicious blog entry about poor customer service from an OPASTCO member who I won't name.  Rumors about layoffs at another OPASTCO member company were the subject of a lengthy discussion on an online forum.  And I stumbled on this comment on Twitter:  "[Another OPASTCO member] has the worst customer service ever.  I am highly annoyed and really want to demand free services for an indefinite period of time."

Consider this, if I could find examples so quickly, so can your customers.  And they do listen to what is said online.  A Society for New Communications Research study conducted last spring found 59 percent of Internet users are using social media (such as blogs and forums) to "vent" about customer care experiences and that 72 percent research companies' customer care online prior to purchasing products and services.  Another survey of Internet users done by Nielsen in 2007 found that 78 percent of those online trust the recommendations made by other consumers.  "The recommendation of someone else remains the most trusted source of information when consumers decide which products and services to buy," said David McCallum, global managing director for Nielsen's Customized Research Services. "Furthermore, given that nothing travels faster than bad news - with estimates that reports of bad experiences outnumber good service reports by as many as 5:1 - the importance of responsive, high quality customer service is yet again highlighted."

 Companies like Comcast can afford to hire staff who are responsible only to monitor and respond to what is being said about the company online.  But even if your company doesn't have the budget for new employees, you should be able to keep track of your online reputation by doing some simple searches, setting up a few online alerts and following up on what you find. 

Step One:  Searching Online

Your first order of business, if you haven't been doing this already, is finding out what is being said about your company online.  There are a variety of search engines you can employ to find mentions of your company or its products on blogs, forums and websites. Beyond the major search engines -Gooogle, Yahoo and Ask - there are a variety of others that dig a little deeper or specialize in certain types of communications: 

• Google Blog Search explores the blogosphere for your keywords and will likely find most mentions of your company.
• Co.mments.com tracks the comments left on blogs and allows you to follow a complete "conversation" taking place in the comments. This site is good if your company appears in certain popular blogs on a regular basis.
• Search.twitter.com allows you to peek into what folks are saying on the micro-blog site, Twitter. Again, in some cases, you can see an entire conversation.
• Zuula.com not only combs the 10 major search engines for your chosen keywords at once, but also allows you to search nine blog search engines with one click.

Pick a couple of these search engines, or any of the countless others, and try plugging in your company name, or the name of one of your products. Spend some time going through the hits - even the ones on pages 3, 4, or 10.  You might also try your company name in combination with some negative words unhappy customers might use (sucks, evil, terrible, etc.).  Hopefully you won't find anything, but in the case of your online reputation with customers, ignorance is NOT bliss. 

Step Two:  Setting Up Alerts

You could periodically do a manual search for your company online (I'd suggest at least once a week to head off any potential problems), or you can set up some "alerts" online to do the work for you down the road.  These alerts will allow you to monitor what's being said online about your company, your competitors or any other topics that interest you. 

Both Google and Yahoo allow you to set up queries that will alert you via email when your chosen topic shows up on the Web.  You can choose how often you are alerted (once a week, once a day, or as it happens), and you can set it to search the entire Internet, or just blogs or news.  Set up alerts on both search engines since sometimes one will uncover something the other misses.  There's even an alert system for Twitter - you'll find this at TweetBeep.com.

Another option is to subscribe to RSS (or Real Simple Syndication) feeds on websites that you know mention your company on a regular basis.  The RSS will monitor the sites and deliver any changes to your RSS reader. 

Step Three: Following Up

A customer who had several problems getting his triple play hooked up in his home created the website ComcastMustDie.com.  The site's creator urged others who'd had customer service problems with Comcast to share their experiences on the site, and to include their account numbers "in case" Comcast happened to be paying attention.  They were, and Comcast contacted several of the folks who came to the site to vent about their bad experiences with the cable company.  Some people have said this is a little "Big Brother"-ish, but it shows initiative on the part of the company to right its wrongs and try to make a customer happy. 

So what should you do if you find derogatory comments about your company online?  It might be as easy as saying "how can I help?"  Obviously, how you respond to comments is going to depend on what the comments are about, where they are and who is saying them. 

If you know who the customer is, and you can do something to help improve the service (for example, get them help with a service problem or billing issue) it would behoove your company to do so.  Send the customer an e-mail, or if possible, call them directly.  Explain where you saw the comments and that you'd like to help.  Customers in most cases will be happy to know someone is listening to them and willing to get them the help they need.

If you can't identify the customer, but you can leave a follow-up comment (either on the blog or the forum), do so.  Make sure your comments are professional and express your company's desire to fix the problem and redeem itself.  If you are comfortable doing so, give them a way to contact you directly. 

In other cases, you might not have any way to follow up.  But it is still good to know what is going on in your community.  Alert management to the types of comments you are finding, especially if there's a trend emerging.  If your customers all seem to be complaining about busy signals when they call your office, it might be time to address how you handle calls.  Or in the case of rumors about your company, you might need to engage in some public relations to set the record straight. 

Historically, the adage has been that a happy customer tells one friend, but an unhappy customer tells 10 friends.  In the Internet age, multiply that by hundreds.  What was a small image problem in the past has the potential to be a major PR nightmare now.  But by following these three simple steps, you'll be better able to protect your company's online reputation and in essence, your company's brand.