Happy Christmas!

This is just a quick post to thank you all for your support for Plebble over the last months and to wish you a very Happy Christmas. We hope it’s restful...

It’s been a great period for us since we went live in August. We now have about 10,000 different people per month visiting the site and we’re having some really interesting ratings/comments. That number’s set to grow when we launch our publicity campaign in early 2008.

Plebble’s leader board has already highlighted some businesses that are obviously providing great service. Essex-based classical music mail order business, Colchester Classics, has been top of the charts for a number of weeks. It’s obvious from their ratings that nothing’s too much trouble – and that, as a result, they’ve got an extremely loyal fan base. Independent wine merchant, Caviste, is a recent entry – in at number 2. They’ve also recently been named in The Guardian’s Shopping Directory (‘the ultimate guide to Britain’s finest independent shops and suppliers’) which seems well deserved based on their ratings. Third is BBC.co.uk (the most popular website in the UK) and 3 John Lewis brands (Waitrose, Ocado and John Lewis) appear in the top 25. To view more best and worst performers on Plebble, please click here: www.plebble.com/analysis.php.

Finally, if you haven’t rated your own Christmas shopping experiences yet, please get online and do it! (Here’s the link: www.plebble.com/rate-it.php) Remember, the more ratings you give, the better Plebble gets, so please do find time in your day to rate. If you bought online, did the stuff arrive on time? Did you go to local, independent stores or big chains? Which was better? Any horror stories? Anyone you want to thank for going the extra mile? Please let us know...

Anyway, have a great Christmas and see you in 2008.

James and Will

Plebble Beta?

A few people have asked us why Plebble didn't launch a Beta version first. We did in a way - Plebble is always Beta in the sense that we always want our users to test the site and tell us how we can improve it. Plebble is for everyone - ie 'a true e-mocracy' - so everyone can input into it. Besides, lately we've been seeing Beta branding being used by some people as a marketing gimic rather than a genuine attempt to get feedback from a site's 'early adopters'.

So, if you've got any feedback or thoughts on the site, please let us know. Also, if you notice any bugs (hopefully you shouldn't but you never know), please tell us so we can get them fixed...

Customer service is the key to reputation

According to research conducted by YouGov and published by the CBI this week, 48% of consumers think excellent customer service is the characteristic that most helps a firm build its reputation. This compares to 36% who said that products and services always living up to expectations mattered the most.

Of the 1,960 adults surveyed, 82% think that companies must work harder at restoring their reputations and 45% said the best way to do this is to come clean and publicly apologise when an issue arises.

The research analysed the relationship between price and reputation. It found that 58% of consumers are willing to pay more to their most highly regarded company, with 43% saying they would pay up to 5% over and above a cheaper price. This demonstrates how important it is for companies to get customer service right. As it is customer service that most affects reputation, which in turn affects the premium companies can charge.

The research also revealed the top ten companies that consumers think have the best reputation in the UK. In order this includes:

1. Marks & Spencer
2. John Lewis Partnership
3. Virgin Group
4. Tesco
5. Sony
6. Asda
7. Amazon
8. Apple
9. Boots
10. BBC

It is still early days, but we can already draw some interesting comparisons of this research to Plebble. With a plebble-rating of 3.04, Marks & Spencer is our 18th highest performer and John Lewis also scores highly, with position of 14th and a plebble-rating of 3.25. With their website bbc.co.uk, the BBC are our 3rd highest performer with a plebble-rating of 3.90 and Boots have a rating of 2.83.

However it is difficult to compare like for like as groups include a collection of brands. Take Virgin Group for example. They have many brands such as Virgin Active, Atlantic, Holidays, Media, Mobile, Money, Trains and so on, but consumers opinions vary between them. For example with a plebble-rating of 2.28, Virgin Atlantic is a highly rated airline, but Virgin Media is our third worst performing organisation with a rating of -3.33.

There are other brands on Plebble which conflict with the survey rankings. This includes Tesco Stores sitting behind Waitrose and Sainsbury's with a plebble-rating of 0.82. Surprisingly Apple also does not rate highly on Plebble with a plebble-rating of -0.57.

The research also highlights the banking sector with 36% of consumers citing it as the the sector most in need of restoring its reputation. Plebble shows that we are indifferent about our banks. Some consumers seem to be positive about their bank and as such we have banks like ICICI, Lloyds TSB and Bank of Scotland rating highly. However on the other end of the spectrum, some banks are poor performers. These include Barclays, Natwest and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Of course you may feel that many of the businesses listed do or don't deserve to be in their respective positions. To compound or contrast a rating please keep rating. It will help us provide you with reliable and live data on the best and worst businesses whether they be local stores or mobile phone companies.

How to rate a free service for value for money?

I can't believe it's been over 2 weeks since our last post. Where has the time gone?! Anyway, here's a quick post to answer a question that seems to be puzzling a few people - "How do you rate for value for money when you got something for free?"

It's a good question. Our take is this: (at the risk of stating the obvious) "value for money" means the value you received versus the money you paid. If you got something for free - for example a free upgrade on a flight - then the money you paid was (obviously) £0. Therefore your score for value for money should be the value you received for the flight upgrade versus the £0 you paid.

So, taking the free flight upgrade example, it may be great value because it gives you a better service than you would have received in, for example, Economy Class PLUS you didn't have to pay for it - therefore a really high value for money score. However, if the air crew were surly and rude or the inflight entertainment doesn't work (or whatever) the value you attribute to the service is still low whether you paid for it or not. You may even have preferred not to have had the upgrade - which would result in a negative value for money score!

As always, we'd be interested to hear your views. Please let us know what you think.

James

Will's first post...

According to Technorati a new blog is created ever second. So the time it has taken me to write this blog 1,800 blogs will have been created. That's a pretty daunting prospect, but here is my contribution to fray. I am Will, brother of James and co-founder of Plebble.com. This is my first attempt at a blog so please bear with me!

Firstly I would like to thank all of you for your feedback. A huge priority of ours is the site’s usability. So far the feedback has been really positive. One user went as far as saying: “it's one of the most simple, intuitive and gratifying user experiences I've ever had”! That was a real pat on the back, but of course the feedback hasn't all been positive. Many of you have notified us with little technical and/or design issues. Without this feedback we would have no idea what does and doesn't work and we wouldn't be able to make the little tweaks to the site. So please keep the feedback coming.

Feedback of course plays a huge part in Plebble.com's concept. As it is feedback that helps businesses improve their service ultimately making us more satisfied.

Of course there are far too many businesses out there that don’t bother listening to their customers, perhaps because they think they don’t need to. There are however businesses who listen and actively encourage people to leave feedback to help them improve their service. We are already finding proactive businesses asking their customers to rate them on Plebble. Craggy Island (an indoor climbing centre in Guilford, Surrey) have put a live plebble-rating™ feed on their website (www.craggy-island.com) and Colchester Classics (a classical music mail order business) have been asking all their customers to rate them. These businesses aren’t afraid of negative feedback. By you telling them where they have gone wrong (-) they have the opportunity to improve (+), they improve (+), which encourages you to come back (+). Therefore a negative experience is turned into a positive outcome. It is no surprise therefore that both these businesses appear in our best performers’ list.

This in part explains why our overall plebble-rating™ is currently 1.22. This pleases me greatly because when we told people about the site before we went live a lot commented “you will only ever get negative comments as people love to moan not compliment”. Well this statistic proves that this is not the case, in fact we are more positive about UK businesses than we are negative. In our supposed doom and gloom society who would have thought that?!

We have seen that many of you come on to get something off your chest by sharing a negative experience of a business, but then you often think of a business you think got it right and you think other people should know about it. This has thrown up some interesting results for example in our worst performers we have 3 banks (RBS, Barclays and Natwest) yet in our best performers we have ICICI Bank. We also have an insurance company (Combined Insurance) and the ISP (Be Unlimited) was up there for a while. These are not the kind of sectors that you would associate with good customer service. However it goes to show that you are willing to reward businesses that get it right.

Will

Our first fortnight (nearly)...

It's been a busy two weeks since we launched. The initial response we've had has been fantastic. Thanks to all you "early adopters" for your ratings! and for everyone's positive feedback.

Here are some early results - The top 5 best-rated businesses are (at the time of writing):

1. Hayward Tod Associates
2. Strategies Group
3. Adnams plc
4. Google
5. BSkyB

As to the worst-performers, there are some more household names. The worst-rated business for customer service so far is RyanAir, followed by - in order - London Underground (the latest round of strikes proving very unpopular with commuters), Ushers Estate Agents, British Gas and Bulldog Broadband.

The Hot sectors (ie attracting the most ratings) seem to be ISPs (especially broadband providers), Banks, Supermarkets, Mobile phone companies, Restaurants and Estate Agents. There's also been a good mixture of positive and negative - the average plebble-rating across the whole site (in other words, taking an average of all ratings we've received to date) is actually quite positive - 1.10.

It's great that we're already getting some useful information but please do keep rating!! The more people rate, the more useful Plebble will be.

We also were tipped in a blog (Fishtank News) which is awesome. Check it out here.

Also in the news is our launch last Monday of a new service (already) called 'In the News'. The press release for it is here but basically it involves us each weekday highlighting and linking to any interesting consumer-related news stories that are in the media - a sort of news-aggregator for consumer-related stories...

Below each story, we put links to the Plebble Homepages of any businesses/organisations that are mentioned in the story so you can rate them and have your say on the issue that the story has highlighted.

Obviously the service is completely free and you can use whatever we say in any way you want. (If you want to use anything that anyone else has written, you’ll have to check with them first…)

We think that the In the News service will be a really good way of continuing to highlight consumer-related issues – that’s what Plebble does anyway – and, in particular, drawing attention to issues that have affected lots of people.

Please use the service and let us know how it works for you. We plan to add various features in the future to help you get even more out of it, including RSS feeds, etc so the news is delivered directly to you.

Also, if you’ve come across (or have written) any stories that you think should appear on In the News, please let us know by emailing us at news@plebble.com.

Thank you!

James

Plebble goes LIVE!

It’s taken over a year and a half but we’re finally LIVE! It’s a great feeling to have something that we’ve worked so hard on finally out there – for everyone to use. Our particular thanks go to Seb Frost and David Wheeler, along with the rest of the Strategies team, for their hard work, dedication and creative thinking. We really couldn’t have done it without you!

What’s next? Now the hard work starts – spreading the word, raising awareness, telling people about Plebble, what it can do for them and ultimately getting ratings/comments so we can start to get some really useful feedback. So, once you’ve read this – please get out there and start rating!

We’re also going to start road-showing Plebble to businesses, to tell them about the benefits of Plebble for them – in particular how they can use it to engage with their customers and ultimately provide a better service. If you are a business and you want us to come and talk to you, please contact info@plebble.com.

We’re also continuing to develop the site. We’ve got loads of ideas about how we can improve it and add new features – almost too many, sometimes. We’d love to hear from you with your thoughts on Plebble and how you think it could be improved. Of course, you can give us feedback using our listing on Plebble (at www.plebble.com/listing219239/plebble/) but also you can comment on this blog below or, if you want to keep your thoughts private, please email us at feedback@plebble.com.

Going forward, I’ll keep you up-to-date with our latest developments and I’ll also post bits of ad hoc analysis from the ratings we’re getting – so check back often – but, until my next post...

Happy Plebbling!