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