Best Customer Service and Experience Feature 2008

How nice! An article I wrote at the beginning of the year for MyCustomer.com - the self-proclaimed voice of the customer relationship management (CRM) profession - has just been awarded 'Best Customer Service and Experience Feature 2008'.

It seems it really touched a nerve - apparently it was their most read feature in 2008. This shows to me that things really are changing in terms of customer engagement. Businesses are beginning to realise that what's happening online - essentially peer-to-peer information and content sharing is here to stay and has a big impact on their bottom-line. Long may that continue!

Anyway, you can read the article here: What does Web 2.0 mean for your business?

Supermarket fans

With a Plebble-rating (PR) of 3.41, Waitrose is the 11th highest performing business on Plebble. Not bad for a supermarket. Why? Well they clearly have some passionate brand advocates. Take a look the graph. It shows that 74% of its ratings on Plebble score between 4 and 5 ('very good' or 'brilliant').

When you compare Waitrose to Tesco's you can see the importance of consistency of service. Tesco's has a PR of 0.36 and is behind its rival Sainsbury's. As you can see from the chart Tesco's does have some strong advocates (38% score 'very good'), but the rest of the ratings are spread across all the scores, with 17% scoring between -5 and -4. This suggests Tesco's struggles to provide consistently good service, something Waitrose manages so well. It will be interesting to see if this finding remains as the sample sizes increase. If you think it's wrong, have your say and rate!

Call centre revenge picked up by the press

Just uploaded to our 'In the News' service is the story about George Bates. This story was picked up by The Times, Telegraph, Mirror, Metro, Daily Mail and the Sun. It is hardly surprising the story got so much coverage considering having your bank account sabotaged after giving poor ratings in a post call customer satisfaction survey is a shocking incident. Although many of us haven't experience such extreme poor service as poor George Bates, we can still relate to it because of our own experiences with call centres. I suspect that is why so many of the daily papers picked up the story.

On Plebble we have a press service where every time you rate you can consent to press contact. We then offer your ratings as case studies for journalists. At the moment we have journalists from the Times and the Independent signed up and we are in the process of encouraging more. So rating on Plebble not only gives your experience good online exposure it could also give it media coverage.

The 'KnowBoard'

Businesses are constantly being told that the internet is changing the dynamic of the way they do business. One of problems is that it is changing so fast and there is so much information out there that businesses don't know which way to turn.

We set up Plebble because we believe the way customers interact with businesses is changing, where consumers are increasingly basing their buying decisions on other consumer opinions. Rather than being a threat to businesses, this represents a big opportunity. An opportunity to gain and retain loyal customers through great customer service. Not only do businesses need to improve customer service, they also need to communicate better with their customers, engage with them and improve their online reputation. This is what Plebble is designed to do for businesses.

To help businesses understand the opportunities and how to realise them we have made live a little feature called the KnowBoard. It is a really simple concept where we, our business members and our affiliates can clip relevant articles, links and videos to the board. It is designed to be a great source of guidance for forward thinking businesses and a place to invoke discussion in the field.

Business members and affiliates can clip articles from their members area. If you are a marketing agency, research firm, consultancy or in any way involved in the customer service, customer engagement and online reputation fields then please get in touch and we will sign you up as an affiliate.

Win an iPod Touch 16GB with Plebble.com

Two little new developments on the site - just live - to tell you about:

1. We've just launched a competition so that people who rate on Plebble can win a brand new iPod Touch 16GB.



2. We've also created a "Tell your Friends" form so that people can easily tell their friends about Plebble and invite them to join in. If you help spread the word about Plebble using this form, you will also qualify to win an iPod.The more ratings you do and the more people you tell about Plebble, the greater your chances of winning.
   

Why've we done this? Well, Plebble works best when as many people as possible are providing ratings. The more ratings there are, the more businesses listen to what consumers are saying and the more valuable the information on Plebble is to other consumers. We therefore want to reward those people who contribute most to our community of users and help make a difference to the customer service that people get in the UK.

All ratings and people you tell about Plebble have to be genuine. If they're not, you'll be disqualified from the competion, simple as that (and, of course, the rating(s) will be deleted).

So, good luck to everyone...and get rating!

Article - How to engage with online critics

The editor of MyCustomer.com, Neil Davey, has written an article entitled 'When the internet attacks: How to engage with online critics'. It offers some great insights into how businesses can benefit by engaging with feedback.

Welcome to the new Plebble Club

The ‘Plebble Club’ is now live! It helps you track your activity on the site and interact with it more. Since Plebble.com’s inception we have always wanted to maintain a ballet box approach to ratings. We think it is vital to provide a really simple and secure ratings process, so you can easily drop in feedback. Keeping the ballet box parallel, we also think it is important that you remain anonymous simply so you feel no pressure or influence from anyone else on your ratings. With the introduction of the Plebble Club, we have maintained this approach whilst giving you features to help you manage and interact with your activity on the site.


You will be some of the first Plebble Club users and we would really appreciate any feedback you have. For example how we can improve the existing functionality and what additions we should make to it. So please get in touch.

Handy Q&A for businesses

Ben Matthews has blogged about us a couple of times, thanks Ben! His lasted post includes a Q&A from James. It is helpful not just for PR's (which is the field Ben works in), but also for businesses looking to engage with Plebble and get the most out of the site.


As a side note, the blog is hosted on Marcom Professional. It is a professional network for those working in marketing communications. For those in the area, it looks like a great resource.

Consumer Satisfaction Index

You may have noticed a new addition to the site and that is our Consumer Satisfaction Index (CSI) in Plebble Analysis. Our CSI is a monthly round up of UK customer satisfaction based on your ratings. Your ratings help us track your overall happiness towards businesses. We call it 'Net Happiness' and as you can see it shows a declining picture :-(. Your ratings also help us track the most and least popular sectors and the best/worst performing businesses. We always meant to add to the Plebble Analysis section and we hope to add more features as the site grows.

Another little addition to the site is you can now receive an RSS feed for all our Plebble News so you never need be out of touch with consumer news again.

Plebble in the news!

Just a quick note to say we had a great piece in the Times Money section on Saturday. We thought Rebecca O'Connor summed up Plebble beautifully by saying "The idea is that the site will force companies into improving service by making customers' experiences visible to everyone."

Thanks of course has to go Jonathan Posner for his case study. Jonathan is a Plebble user who rated Plebble and consented to press contact. Thanks Jonathan!

A recession is bad, but it's not all bad

Recession - are we, aren't we? Who knows? There is enormous confusion at the moment as to whether we are in a recession, we are heading for one or we survived by the skin of teeth. Whether we are in a recession or not, there is no doubt that the economy is showing signs of slowing. Recessions are rarely thought of as good news, however there are some goods that come out in times of financial hardship.

One of those is customer service. The theory goes that in times of hardship businesses have to fight harder for your custom. If you have less to spend you will think harder about where to spend your money. If everyone else has less to spend businesses are competing for a shrinking pot of money making them work harder perhaps offering discounts but also focusing on customer satisfaction. The businesses that survive recessions are the ones that have a loyal customer base. A base of customers that not only use but recommend a business. Providing excellent customer service and communicating that message is key to survival and even prosperity for businesses.

So if the theory holds you should be noticing an upturn in customer service. In tough times businesses need your support and you can do that simply by rating them on Plebble. This will benefit other consumers too by helping them find businesses based on your recommendations.

Plebble Starter package goes Live!

Well this is the place where we keep you up-to-date with all our developments and our latest one 'PlebbleStarter™' package for businesses has arrived! Now any business can take ownership of their business on Plebble for FREE! PlebbleStarter™ includes numerous free tools for businesses. Please have a look at the features to see what is on offer. You will note that we have premium services for businesses too. These are in the form of 'pay-as-you-go' and are to further help businesses improve their appearance, raise awareness and gather feedback.

On PlebbleStarter™ we give businesses the ability to respond. This is a great way of helping businesses and consumers communicate and engage with each other. Each response is posted live on the site and the rater concerned is notified when a reply has been made. This is very powerful for businesses as it gives them an opportunity to turn a negative comment into a positive outcome. Not only can a business win back the disaffected consumer it can also show everyone else how they are responding to problems and lets face it even the best businesses make mistakes so we all need to tell people how we are rectifying and improving. We have already seen consumer problems rectified through the site but the response feature only helps this further.

Of course businesses can also respond to positive comments, to thank their customers for their loyal support and tell them how they are making things even better.

With all the hype surrounding social networks, perhaps a good way of looking at a PlebbleStarter™ membership is as a business's own online profile. The big difference of course is that businesses don't have a choice whether they have a profile or not. Consumers have opinions on the businesses they use and want to share those opinions with others. There is very little businesses can do about these conversations and with the internet and sites like ours conversations are increasing and spreading further all the time. So why not be part of the conversation? This not only involves the response feature as mentioned above, but it also includes the ability for businesses to customise their page and branch pages with logos, descriptions and website links. Businesses can also add their own news stories and special offers to keep customers up to date with all their developments.

I hope you agree that the PlebbleStarter™ package really enhances the concept. If you have and feedback then you can of course rate us! Alternatively please get in touch by emailing us at info@plebble.com we always love hearing from you.

James's broadband nightmare

I have been amused to listen to my brother James (who sits next door to me), spend the last few weeks speaking to an unnamed broadband provider's call centre trying to reconnect to his broadband package. You would have thought it is the simplest of tasks and one that they would dedicate resources to, but it seems to be impossible to connect. I have listened to him slowly melt with frustration. It would be harsh to say that I am amused by his misfortune, more because it underlines why we need Plebble!

James has since gone elsewhere and taken the hit of paying nearly twice the price. However his new broadband provider is treating him so well that he his quickly becoming an advocate for the company. His case is a simple example of how important it is for businesses to serve their customers well. Not only has James's old broadband provider lost £150 a year customer, but it has also lost an unquantifiable amount through his negative word of mouth. That the fact that word of mouth is unquantifiable is a large reason why businesses provide poor service. As they can't measure it they can't assess the downside of treating someone badly and the upside for treating someone well. This is no excuse however, it is the businesses like James's new provider that understand the importance of treating customers well that ultimately win.

Plebble team up with Savebuckets

SaveBuckets - Save a whole load of money

If you are a fan of Savebuckets.co.uk you will notice a slight addition to the site - we have teamed up with them! Savebuckets are a free online shopping comparison site which helps you find the best priced product. It is a very simple and quick process, you type in the product you are after into their search box and from over a million products Savebuckets will then generate relevant results sorted by price. You then select the product and are directed the cheapest retailer. Savebuckets have now integrated our Plebble-rating so that it not only shows the best price but also the best service (Plebble-rating). Savebuckets users can now assess according to a retailers value and value for money, i.e. value plus service. For example you may be more inclined to spend a little bit more from a retailer because you are confident in their quality service.

Here is an example of the service in action.

'Local Heros ' on Plebble

There has been plenty in the news over the last few days about the effect supermarkets are having on competition in local areas. This coincides with the release of the Competition Commission's findings into the UK grocery market. We reported this in In the News on Friday. We are interested to know what effect supermarkets have on local businesses and local communities. According to research that we released, 39% of people think that supermarkets are damaging their community making them the second worst culprit. Property developers were number one at 42% and government was third at 38%. The Commission's report is being criticised for not addressing the effect supermarkets have on local businesses.

What is interesting to note is the widespread support for local businesses. An example of this is the Evening Standard's campaign to 'Save Our Small Shops' in response to the closure of 7,000 small shops in London in the last six years. Our research shows that there is eagerness to respond, with 93% of people intending to support their local organisations in 2008. Small shops find it hard to compete with supermarkets on price, range, convenience and marketing clout. Obviously the best way to support our local shops is to physically buy from them. However recommending that business to others is an extra way to support it. On Plebble we call it 'Local Heros'. These are the businesses that deserve our thanks and support. So to help support your local businesses and local community please rate your Local Heros on Plebble.

Press coverage

We had some great coverage from Rosie Millard in her column in the Save & Spend section of the Independent last week. Have a read! James has also been interviewed on BBC Radio. The response to the coverage has been superb so thanks for all your support.

A few more developments for you...

As ever we have been developing away to bring some more features to the site. Firstly something we have been meaning to add for a while is Google Maps on each businesses page. Take Sainsbury's for example, now you can easily find the businesses you are looking for.











We have also added a free alert for all users. On each business page you can sign up to an alert everytime someone rates and everytime we or the business concerned posts a response or a news story. Whether you are a consumer, work for the business or a business owner you can keep fully up-to-date. Which makes you better informed and helps you participate in the conversation.

We are constantly developing the site and aim to bring more features online soon. Please keep sending in your suggestions for tweaks and improvements, it all helps to make a better user experience.

'What is going on at Plebble.com'

Hi, this is just a quick update of what is going on at Plebble.

Firstly MyCustomer.com has published one of James's articles, entitled 'What does web 2.0 mean for your business?' I recommend reading it, particularly if you are a business owner.

We have also made a few minor developments to the site. Firstly we have added a news scroller for our 10 latest In the News stories. It also allows business Members to upload stories, which are clearly marked as sponsored.

We have also added a latest 10 ratings fader on the Plebble.com splash page. We felt the page was too static otherwise.

As always we love hearing from you, so if you have any questions or comments on these or anything else on the site then please contact us.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! It is great to be back at Plebble after a little break over the festive period. We hope you all enjoyed yourselves.

I picked something up on Google News this morning, which I thought I would share. Silicon.com posted an article on Forsee results which has complied the top 30 UK online retailers for customer service over the Christmas period. Forsee found that pure online retailers such as Play.com and Amazon.co.uk came first and second scoring 76 and 75 out of 100 respectively. It was a mixed bag for traditional retailers websites with many featuring at the bottom of the list including the likes of B&Q, Comet, Currys, PC World and WH Smith. However bucking the trend was HMV coming fourth in the list.

These Forsee results are consistent with Plebble for example Amazon.co.uk and HMV have Plebble-ratings of 3.13 and 3.66.

The findings give a useful insight into who were the online customer service winners and losers over the Christmas period. In the News today was Play.com for 24% jump in sales over the Christmas period. Play.com is top of Forsee's list, which shows that it really does pay companies to deliver good customer service.

There has been plenty In the News about the growing prefence amongst shoppers to buy online. For example it is thought £14 billion was spent online by UK consumers this Christmas.

If you were one of them please log onto to Plebble and rate you Christmas experiences (positive or negative). That way we can use your experiences to help fellow consumers and businesses, which should mean next Christmas you will get an even better shopping experience!