Carphone Warehouse signs up to Plebble

Last week Carphone Warehouse signed up to Plebble. Not only was it great to see another brand sign up but more importantly a brand which has such a poor service reputation. I met Guy Stephens, the man behind Carphone Warehouse's move. He is the online help manager at Carphone and is doing a great job engaging with his customers. Guy is not only looking at Plebble but at other forums where he can engage with customers and resolve their issues. He is actively using Twitter to do this, check out his Twitter profile to see all the hard work he is doing.

What I find so exciting about this is here is a company with poor service rankings that understands how important it is to engage with customers on a peer to peer level. Negative comments can act as deterrent for businesses to engage. Nobody likes criticism and naturally we all try and distance ourselves from it. This however is often a grave mistake. Negative comments offer enormously constructive feedback. Left untouched they can be a threat to business, but dealing with them presents a huge opportunity to turn things around. Carphone seem to get this and that is why they are prepared to roll up their sleeves and get stuck into the hard but fruitful work of dealing with customers problems online.

At Plebble, we have seen several of the worst big brand service offenders silently listening to customer feedback but not actively engaging with them yet. This shows that they know it's important, but they don't know how do deal with it. Carphone is a good example of a brand setting the precedent and we believe more will follow.

What's the reason for a shift in attitudes by brands? One big reason is the growth of Twitter, but that's a post for another time...