I agree, in general, that service is not at a level that we can be proud of down here in SA. I think that’s why companies such as getclosure (http://www.getclosure.co.za) are making such inroads into the marketplace. They offer a great balance of solid complaint delivery and an effective, discreet service to their subscribers (corporates who are the target of service complaints).

ORM is really starting to become more and more important and it seems that SA is only starting to wake up to it’s potential – in my opinion.

I am totally generalizing when I say the following – but we don’t seem to have really GREAT service in SA – not as a culture. There are some refreshing exceptions here and there, but IT’S CERTAINLY not the norm.

With Social Media becoming an increasingly preeminent public voice, a decent ORM Strategy will become part and parcel of the Marketing budget of any company who takes their customers, clients, brand, audience and prospects seriously.

Fortunately their are some great companies such as WWC that are actively playing a pro-active part in creating a solution here and now

- measure: it allows you to measure which marketing/comms/brand activities are working and off the back of that focus budget on getting the most bang for your buck (maximise).

So I guess there two angles to this, one – use it as a brand perception management tool and secondly use ORM as a market research tool to impact top level business decisions.

My 2 cents ,

@timshier
@brandseye