British gas price increase inversely proportional to customer satisfaction rating.

July 30, 2008 By Leave a Comment

British Gas prices v. customer satisfaction ratingInteresting that.

Plebble.com is one of an increasing number of places where the consumer can rate the service they’ve received from any business they’ve had dealings with.

And if the company you want to comment on isn’t there, simply add it – then rate it.

There are many sites vying for the role of ‘customer feedback central’ but not many put together as many useful features as Plebble.com. Another site that does is GetFeedback.com – a place where social media meets feedback to provide an opportunity for any company to be seen to be listening and responding.

According to customer feedback on Plebble.com, British Gas is already 2nd from bottom of their entire list of businesses for customer satisfaction and a 35% price hike isn’t going to help in the slightest.

It makes me wonder: is there no limit to the fuel and gas price increases that we’ll tolerate as businesses and individuals?

Filed Under: business insight, feedback, ORM

‘mu:kau aims to improve business communication

July 3, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Rich media sites are perfect for dialogue between a business and its customers

We’re excited to be developing a product – with the support of Iain Scott of Enterprise Island fame – that pulls together audio, video, text, images and all manner of social media gadgets and gizmos into a simple, powerful communication hub that anyone can use.

As well as knowing how to get their messages across using all the new ‘word-of-mouth’ social media platforms, businesses also need to develop listening skills in the online world so that customers feel they’re being heard.

Our product encourages two-way communication, feedback and response to resolve issues before they become online reputation problems.

Filed Under: news, ORM

Could do better…

June 15, 2008 By Leave a Comment

What’s the one thing that the UK Podcasters Association really needs to be able to demonstrate it can do well?

You’d be forgiven for answering ‘Podcasting’ :-)

The dire quality of the video podcasts currently on their home page sends a really poor message to the wider world. I’d seriously recommend taking them down – particularly since there are better versions of the same events elsewhere on the site.

Even though the other versions are slightly more watchable (because you can hear the audio) they still make what I think is a big mistake: they’re video. Why is that a mistake? Because the image doesn’t add enough to make the huge filesizes worth it.

It also means that I can’t take it in the car to listen while I’m doing something else. I’m not against video podcasting. On the contrary – I’m all for it when it’s presenting information that can’t be presented any better way but I’m not sure this is a good example of that.

Filed Under: marketing, ORM, smile

Q: How do I upload a digital file with wordpress e-commerce plugin?

June 11, 2008 By Leave a Comment

A: I don’t know how you get a digital mp3 file uploaded using the e-commerce plugin.

Nor do a lot of other fed up people it seems because there’s no documentation to tell you how.

Since there’s no answer to my most basic question I’m doing what I advised here and using this blog to hijack the search phrase :-) If you arrived here looking for answer, sorry to disappoint you. Sadly, I’m just filling a void that shouldn’t be there to make a point.

A lot of the people who want to use WordPress and plugins like this aren’t techies. That means they need well-written guidance in order to get these things to work, otherwise they’re going to get frustrated and give up.

Surely a straightforward WordPress e-commerce plug-in is the Holy Grail of blogging? If the developer could just make this thing easier to use, I’ve no doubt he’d end up with more paying customers. If I could get it to work, I for one, would have no problem paying a fee to build it into sites for small business clients

Filed Under: business insight, GRRRR!!!, ORM

Real people vs. faceless aggregation

June 6, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Here’s the text of an email I sent this morning to the editor of an online business ‘magazine’ site:

.
left speech marksMy first impression was ‘I like the clean look, like the depth of material..’ but after the first 30 seconds, my critical eye kicked in.

As a new business visitor, I’m looking for some kind of anchor that will tell me this isn’t just a faceless aggregation of ‘business content’ trying to earn advertising money.

With that in mind, the first thing that struck me was those awful word-ads (the double-underlined generic links to ads).

The second was 2 sets of Google Ads (in addition to sponsor banners)

The third was ‘0 comments’ everywhere (despite being going several years).

The fourth was that you published my comment without moderation (alarm bells!)

The fifth was how difficult it was to get to real people behind the scenes (to send this email).

These days, the value of information is increasingly defined by the ‘social’ context it appears in. If there’s nobody around (i.e. Invisible editors, intangible contributors, unseen readers engaged in noright speech marks discussions) then there’s no ‘social context’ to this information, which greatly reduces it’s value.

Do you think information needs real people to give it value?

Filed Under: business insight, marketing, ORM

Online reputation management. Not.

April 11, 2008 By Leave a Comment

This is a recent, real review about a real hotel. It is public, still there, available for anyone to read.

A BIG DISAPPOINTMENT.

We were allocated a second floor room fronting onto the street and the noise from late night revellers outside adjacent bars continued into the early hours of Saturday morning. Sleep was impossible.

OK you say, typical for [location] and it did finally settle down – for about an hour. However, persons in the next room returned and we endured loud conversation, radio/tv at high volume and hysterical laughter throughout the rest of the night. Our complaints to reception resulted in the comment “They are entitled to laugh” It continued, even louder. We checked out in the morning!.

We expected some explanation, regret and maybe an apology. No contact until 3 emails inviting us to “Visit [name] Hotel This Festive Season”. This prompted a reply from me reiterating our experience. It was ignored.
I sent a reminder email – “HOW ABOUT THE COURTESY OF A REPLY?” No response – But I did receive a copy of an internal email in error, it says everything about [name] Hotel, [location] viz. “John remove them from the email database please Regards”

How beligerant. Unable to recommend to anyone.

When we read online reviews, we’re doing two things simultaneously: we’re looking at the detail and the bigger picture to decide whether to buy. We expect the odd slip-up in service or the occasional faulty goods. But if we spot a trend of poor service, faulty goods or a failure of the business to respond to such problems – we’re suddenly on consumer high-alert.

What we won’t forgive is someone’s unwillingness to listen when we’ve had a less-than-satisfactory experience. In the case of the hotel (above) there is a worrying silence despite there being a facility to respond via the online review site. Of course, it’s possible the hotel has resolved this matter to the customer’s satisfaction offline. But the absence of any online response suggests that’s unlikely.

A prospective customer will conclude that either this hotel is as beligerent as the reviewer asserts or that they are incapable of handling this situation. Either way, the original problem of noisy rooms still remains unresolved (bad) and now, added to that, the impression that nobody gives a damn (worse).

This situation presents two significant challenges for this hotel. It clearly needs to develop the skills to monitor and respond publicly to such critical and public online reviews.

But in order to address and resolve this particular review – and to avoid others like it in the first place – the management in this hotel has to change how it deals with feedback in the first place.

1 star reviews on national hotel review sites are – make no mistake – acts of punishment.

The crime isn’t the noisy bedroom. The crime is not listening.

Filed Under: business insight, marketing, ORM, WOW! Tagged With: , ,

O.R.M

March 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment

They say that 2008 is lining up to be the year of ‘online reputation management’. I agree. The consumer review, whether clustered in online review sites or splattered through blogs all over the web, has turned conventional marketing on its head – and most operators don’t even know it.

Right now, we’re seeing the rapid growth of ‘online reputation management’ solutions – tools and consultancy services designed to roam the web and harvest what people are saying and suggest ways of countering negative feedback.

We’re interested because ‘mu:kaumedia seems to be working at the opposite end of the process – launching a package designed to stop consumers punishing organisations through the use of the damning review in the first place.

Watch this space. ORM is what the social networking revolution is all about.

Filed Under: business insight, ORM Tagged With: ,

When 5 stars = 0 stars

March 22, 2008 By 1 Comment

Our business is about using feedback to develop ourselves and our organisations, so you’d expect us to be sticking our noses into all kinds of feedback and review systems. Here’s one I came across recently. ‘The Good Garage Scheme”.

This feedback scheme is ostensibly about driving up the standards of workmanship and customer service in garages across the UK. However, the first thing that struck me about this scheme was that every garage listed (and there appear to be several hundred at least) seems to score 5 out of 5 stars. The written feedback (where supplied) also appears to be exclusively positive.

I then learned that the scheme is operated by Forte – a company supplying high-price, high-margin ‘emission-control’ fuel additives to the garages in the GoodGarageScheme system.

The absence of balancing feedback undermines the value of any 5-Star rating but that’s not the only issue for me here. The fact that it’s clearly in Forte’s interest to have as many 5-Star-rated garages as possible recommending its products to a trusting public leaves the whole thing open to criticism.

Filed Under: business insight, GRRRR!!!, ORM Tagged With: ,

Got some bad news for you, business.

March 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment

You’re not in charge of what people say about you.

Interesting article in the Institute of Directors’ newsletter about ‘Web 2.0′. Blogs, podcasts, forums and social networks are all very attractive add-ons for business it says, however:

“…you should also steel yourself for negative or even harmful feedback. Hackers and disaffected staff can use blogs and social networking forums to post negative feedback about your business.

And you need to be confident in your product or service before allowing customers to review it openly on the web. If they do highlight problems – be ready to fix them quickly.”

The idea that you can in some way control customers reviewing your products and services openly on the web is completely stuck in 20th century thinking. Put a blog on your site or don’t, it makes no different to the power of online customer feedback & reviewing. The beauty of this information revolution is that it’s going to force you to do one of three things:

1) Provide great service

2) Provide great customer service when you fail to provide great service or -

3) Lose customers

Filed Under: business insight, ORM Tagged With: ,

Mac – you have lost a lifelong customer

February 2, 2008 By 6 Comments

Its Saturday evening and I’m forced to back up manually every single piece of data from my iMac G5. Why? Because the VRAM is now crumbling (all the Mac icons not only have a cross-hatched box around them, the screen is now blurring everything)* see faults below.

This started to happen before the machine was 2 years old. It’s now 2 years 2 months and its going to be in a skip in a matter of days. Why? Because the repair is £600 – and because I wasn’t prepared to pay the extra £139* for ‘Extended’ Apple Care cover in the first place.

Faults since purchase:

• Fan so noisy that the machine cannot be used for podcasting / recording - known fault

• Power supply failed completely after several months of intermittent shutdowns (Apple replaced under considerable pressure) - known fault

• VRAM failure (renders the machine unusable for anything that requires moving image) - known fault

• * Blurring graphics / text - traced to bug in an obscure ‘Universal Access setting’ remedied only via user forums - known bug

• CD & DVD Burner no longer work

Despite the fact that all the problems this machine has suffered from are well known to Mac – a fact attested to by their ‘limited’ admission of liability in the form of a Repair Extension Programme covering a certain range of machines (not mine of course), Apple have nothing to say about this situation. “You had the choice to take out the Extended Apple Care cover” was their last word on the subject. It appears there are virtually no guidelines as to what length of service should make a computer ‘fit for service’ so Apple and others can continue to manufacture machines that – to all intents and purposes – demand an extended warranty to make them viable propositions as business machines.

As I said in another post, our teenage son’s 5+ year old Packard Bell is still whirring away in his bedroom. Losing our business’s principal computer to a total breakdown is infuriating – but it gets worse. Not only has the VRAM failed almost completely, the CD / DVD burner has progressively given up over the last few months alongside the other problems. So as if to add insult to injury, I am not even able to backup my business data to CD or DVD. As we speak, I’m having to transfer it (painstakingly slowly) across our wireless network to our iBook which itself is not working properly. That means I’m still going to have to back all that data up AS WELL to disk because in all likelihood, I’m going to have to press our PC laptops into service.

A computer that fails twice with known problems before its first two years are up is not, as far as I’m concerned, fit for the purpose. And make no mistake, if taking out expensive extended Apple Care cover is the only way you’re going to be able to depend on this machine still working two years later, then it’s not - as the Apple customer service lady informed me – “a choice”, it’s actually what I would call “a pre-requisite“.

Apple stood its ground and refused to fix this machine. If we did this for you, they said, what about all the other people who had paid for the extra cover?

What they don’t seem to understand is that in turning me from the net promoter I used to be (selling their product for them to cohort upon cohort of students over 10 years lecturing at Universities) to a net detractor, they’ve already lost £900 (the Mac I’m now not going to buy). And that’s before I share my personal – and considered – experience with countless people from this point onwards. So by my reckoning, it’s already lost them financially more than it would have cost them in cash to fix the machine. And that’s before even considering the impact of negative feedback I will be sharing with all the people in future who ask me ‘Mac or PC?’.

I can see that there have been views in to this Blog from the Apple technical forums where I posted my dissatisfaction. People will make up their own minds as to whether or not they’re willing to pay for extended Apple Care or risk their business machine failing with faults that aren’t even worth repairing.

*corrected figure

Filed Under: GRRRR!!!, news, ORM Tagged With: , , ,
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