Open feedback for Little Chef

After watching Heston Blumenthal's programmes 'Big Chef takes on Little Chef' on Channel 4 back in January we decided to go down to the transformed Popham restaurant. I would love to spend the rest of this post reviewing the restaurant, but this isn't the place for that. Needless to say they have done a great job. The food is like something out of a gastro pub, the architect has created a funky space and the staff are all really friendly and seem up for transforming the place.

Anyway back the point of my post and that is feedback. With the re-launch at Popham, Little Chef seem to be making an effort to connect with their customers and gather feedback. They have a Facebook fan page and a feedback form on their website. Popham is just down the round from my Mum's house, so she came along. Even she was incredibly impressed! She wanted to let Little Chef know what she thought about her experience, so she filled out their online feedback form. She was told that she would be contacted by a member of the Little Chef customer services team within 14 working days regarding her comments. Sure enough she received a letter a week later. Again impressive! Little Chef seem to be doing the right things and working hard, but they could leverage their feedback much more effectively. Why not have open/transparent feedback? Open feedback online not only gives a great brand message it also makes other customers feel more vested in the brand. Little Chef can then respond to demonstrate how seriously they take the feedback and what they are doing about it. With a letter to my Mum only she gets this message, if it goes online everybody gets it.

As with many sites Little Chef has a customers comments section. Whilst this is better than nothing, it's not exactly democratic. Perhaps Little Chef do post every comment up but as a customer the cynic in you says they only put the good stuff up. That is where having an independent forum like Plebble comes in, adding value to customers feedback!

I believe Little Chef are now considering whether to roll out Heston's Popham concept across the country. I don't have access to all their info but look at Facebook, their website, press and numerous other sites, the message is a resounding thumbs up for Popham. I really hope they listen.

Should brands engage through Twitter?

Twitter's recent surge has been well documented, just take a look at the last 6m's from Alexa.

The question dominating the blogosphere is how is Twitter going to make revenues? This morning whilst I was on Twitter I picked up a Brand Republic article entitled 'Twitter to begin charging brands for commercial use'. The article reports that Twitter are thinking about charging brands for using a hybrid Twitter marketing and customer service tool. This seems sensible when you consider so many brands are using Twitter for just that (marketing and customer service). The issue then becomes whether brands belong on Twitter. Mashable did a blog post on just that, which sparked some interesting debate. I have to confess I did not read all of the 199 responses to the blog, but from skimming through, many of them seemed to think there is a place for brands on Twitter.

I agree with having brands on Twitter for 2 reasons. 1 because I think active engagement by brands, not just passive monitoring is a very positive step for consumers and businesses and 2 because Twitter's basic functionality works. Take Be Broadband as an example. They actively use Twitter and are incidentally in Plebble's top 10 performers. If I am a Be customer I can choose to follow their updates, I am interested in them because I am customer. If they start filling my Twitter page with duff updates, I can stop following them or even block them. So Twitter is a democratic opt-in service. If brands are not engaging or don't play by the rules they simply won't find Twitter an effective tool. However if they get it right they could have thousands of happy followers acting as advocates for their brand.









That said there are still some outstanding issues for brands on Twitter. Many brand names have already been taken by Twitter users and there is no easy way users can distinguish Twitter usernames as official brands. Twitter is a very personal and social tool. Just communicating with a brand name can be impersonal for users. The alternative is to register employees as representatives for the brand. The issue with that is employees move on taking all their hard work on Twitter with them. As Twitter try to monetise, I am sure they will try and make Twitter more accessible to brands and address these issues. The key to Twitter is its simple functionality. This must remain, but I think Twitter could create official brand/company accounts to deal with this. In the meantime however I don't think brands should hold back. For brands Twitter has its flaws, but they are outweighed by the positive act of engagement.

Digital Mission

Plebble has been selected as part of ‘Digital Mission’ to go to the South by South West Interactive (SXSWi) conference in Austin Texas. We are delighted to be taking part in SXSWi. Digital Mission sends 35 UK companies out to SXSWi. It is one of the world’s leading conferences for emerging media and digital technology. We were selected along with 34 other companies by a panel of industry experts including Mike Butcher the UK editor of Techcrunch, Herb Kim the CEO of Codeworks and Sarbjit Bakshi Head of IT from UKTI.

The conference takes place in early March and accompanies the SXSW film and music festivals, so it should a great time to be there. We cannot wait to go, see the American digital scene, meet some interesting people and hopefully do some business. We will let you know how it goes!

Plebble launches 'AdviceCentre'

Many of your ratings on Plebble are glowing praise - which is great - but there are others where you are obviously completely frustrated at how you've been treated. Your attempts to resolve your problem simply and quickly have failed and you have come to Plebble to vent your feelings to the company concerned and everyone else. This is exactly what Plebble is designed for - to reward those businesses who care, name and shame those who don't, and make you feel a whole lot better.

But we've always wanted Plebble to be more than just a place to rant. We continue to encourage businesses to join the Plebble project and use it to actively listen and respond to the issues you raise. We don't just want to hear about your experiences - ultimately we want Plebble to be a force which helps get your issues resolved. And the more you all rate, the more businesses will have to sit up and take notice.

In the meantime, we at Plebble were becoming increasingly frustrated hearing people raise all sorts of problems and complaints, but not being able to do anything to help. So, we have set-up the AdviceCentre. In the AdviceCentre, we will publish articles and links to give you information on things like how best to complain, where to send formal complaints, template letters and company procedures. We are also publishing a series of 'Get Smarter' articles, where we use your ratings and other sources to gather together information to help us all to try to avoid the pitfalls and worst offenders in the first place.

This is a new thing for us and as with everything on Plebble, we rely on your feedback. So if you have any comments on the AdviceCentre, please let us know. And if you have any advice that you think would be useful to share, please email advice@plebble.com.

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.