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Where are Customer Service Rating Systems?
mugnyte asks: "There are various ways to watch single complaints congeal into a groundswell of 'market issue' (Badware add-ons, Sony root-kit, AOL un-install, etc) via blogs and google numbers, but I'm finding no sites that rate Customer Service on an ongoing basis. I'm looking for something like the home-service-industry Angie's List or perhaps Tom's Hardware guide, but on the topic of Customer Service. Is there anyone doing the hard work to gather and legitimately rate companies by their quality of service?"
Dude, it's the internet, and you're complaining about badware? :)
Ok, seriously, the company itself (like AOL) should have some guest book/ a telephone number where you could leave your complaints.
It's been around for a while, and it's called the Better Business Bureau. You can view ongoing complaints for not only things in your physical location, but they also have an online component (http://www.bbbonline.org/).
Now, it doesn't support all sorts of businesses, but it's easy to see if one company has bad customer service.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
The Better Business Bureau and Consumer Reports both come to mind. If you're looking for something similar to Reseller Ratings, I don't know if I would personally trust it. Looking through the comments left in Reseller Ratings, many negative comments are there because the buyer didn't get away with their latest misprint-price-match scam, or they tried to cancel an order after it shipped, or they tried to return an item after filing a rebate for it, etc etc etc. Sure there is some valuable information in there, but there's also a whole lot of meaningless filler.
...its hard to rate something like a customer service department because of the extreme range of possible outcomes regardless of actual problem. One person can call in with some issue or another and acomplish something like get a month of their cable bill credited, or a month of free HBO, or a grand total of nothing. So much depends on how you deal w/ those customer service basterds. If such a system were to exist, its benefit would be to inform would-be callers of possible call outcomes; if you know its possible to get part or all of your bill credited, you will certainly aproach a call to a customer service departmet apropriatly. Similarly, if you know that it is possible to get late charges and/or interest rates removed from your bill, this knowledge can influence what strategy you take when calling.
Wouldn't anyone ambitious enough to look for others' customer service experience just google first? If there something to vent about, someone has already done it on the web.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Going to be big, eventually. Try epinions.com or rateit.com. The problem is their rating systems are still very crude indeed.
At some point someone will come up with a reputation system which will allow everything down to individuals to be rated. Perhaps different aspects of a product, service or individual. Possibly classifying the user by their ratings as well in order to more closely predict what someone will like or dislike, just because you like coke doesn't mean that the next guy thinks that pepsi is rubbish, or that the democrats are crap because you're a republican. Hmm, least squares regression I reckon.
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Someone's written an article on reputation systems and it even mentions slashdot's karma.
i ndex.html
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/
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It looks like the site (and the author) has been mostly reabsorbed by InfoWorld, but Ed Foster's http://www.gripe2ed.com/ blog/site has a history of collecting such information, and the http://www.gripewiki.com/ also has areas with specific vendors listed (although the lists are woefully incomplete) -- in fact, I'd probably recommend skipping the wiki entirely unless you just have time to burn.
http://tinyurl.com/fcoog
Note that it does have a star-rating, but that's just an overall score. And it has 28 reviews. Here's a quote from one review:
I think that gives you an up-close & personal insight into the customer service. Any local business can be listed. Most don't seem to have many reviews. You could start adding yours.
-Tony
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
From their website:
"The gethuman project is a consumer movement to improve the quality of phone support in the US. This free website is run by volunteers and is powered by over one million consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies that they use.
We will soon publish a list of the best and worst mass-market consumer companies in the US based on how long it takes to get to a human on the phone and on the quality of support received."
So, right now, this website is great for finding direct-to-human numbers and then as a place to rate customer service. Soon it will be a great place to see how others have evaluated the customer service of various companies.
Hope this helps!
Ian
Not quite a rating agency but an organization that collects a whole lot of valuable data and compiles some useful reports from its members. Association of Support Professionals [http://www.asponline.com/]
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
(judging by the lack of comments here, anyway)
There is useful information out there though, and it's usually in independant sites for users-of-all-of-the-manufacturers-of-product-x. To pick just one example, http://www.adslguide.org.uk/ is very concerned with the quality of the various offerings.
There's also the likes of http://blagger.com/ and http://www.clik2complaints.co.uk/ for seeing how often things have gone wrong for other people. All of these are UK examples, but surely there are national equivalents in most places?
The problem with things like this is they don't usually work. BBB is worthless almost to the point that it should be dismantled as it does NOTHING for the consumer.
In the S.F. Bay area there used to be a program called "Value Star". It is still out there, and they have asked us to join like we were once members, but it fails miserably in what it is suppose to do as well. They do a good job of checking out each of their members and assigning a rating. However the business must be a member and pay dues. If they aren't a member, they don't get tracked. On top of that, there is really very little incentive for a business to be a member. My company was a full fledged member before I was an owner years ago. Not once did we ever have a customer tell us they came to us because we were gold star rated or found us on the value star website. Any consumer I asked about it had never heard of Value Star. So their point of helping consumers find good service providers fails simply because the consumer isn't aware of them. Plus it doesn't help that they have closed the doors on several occasions without warning but still sent out invoices for dues.
I was actually going to start something that was free and wiki-like in the hopes of having a good site for people to rate and find rating on companies nation wide, but sadly, I didn't have the time. That and thinking more about it I've realized that the only time people will look/use something like that is when they're getting bad service. Very few people actually take the time to say anything good about a company. When they get what they expect they stay silent. Hence the phrase "1 unhappy customer speaks louder than 500 happy ones".
Value Star has a good idea, but they don't do enough marketing for people to actually know it exists so it's a poor value for a business which of course means no businesses such as myself are members. And that means we're not rated good or bad.
no comments!??
The problem with a place/program/system that would help rate Customer service is manyfold. First, how reliable can it be? There are people out there that believe as I do, if I can take the time to complain I'll also take the time to complement. There are actually a lot of people who take the few extra minutes to let someone's supervisor or comment board know that they received good customer service. But compared to those that are upset for whatever reason, those people's voices are always silenced. For instance, we had a teacher rating system at my university. The teachers were rated in very detailed categories on a sliding point scale, and then voters were allowed to leave comments. The problem would be people's feedback wouldn't match up. There were redundant questions worded completely different but meaning the same thing and people would answer differently. Then people would just answer whatever to the questions and just put all their frustrations in the comments. Others yet would want to give the teacher a bad rating because they did poorly on one assignment. As far as customer service is concerned, there are too many factors to keep an accurate rating of any business. Here is an example; Mrs. Jones calls a cable company because she is having problems accessing her Internet service. Now we all know there a lot of reasons why Mrs. Jones might not be able to access the Internet. Lets say on this first call her problem is a winsock issue, that's an OS based issue. An issue for which Mrs. Jones would have to call her OEM or MS, yet she gets upset and curses the customer service rep. If she took any sought of survey, since she is the one receiving the customer service she is the only one fit to rate it, she would give that company bad ratings regardless of how well the customer service rep handled her problem. You people wouldn't believe how many kinds of calls can fall into this category. I am a customer service rep at a cable company. I'd say maybe on average I take over 200 calls a day. I can count on my fingers how many of those people calling in actually have a legit gripe against my company. The rest have the TV on the wrong channel, haven't paid their bills, are stealing cable (happens all the time, yes they call in), are having 3rd party equipment problems, etc etc etc. Basically non-cable related issues that we have no way of fixing over the phone. That is why any kind of rating system wouldn't work. This doesn't mean that there isn't bad customer service; I've had bad customer service from plenty of companies, especially insurance companies. I just don't see there being a why to effectively rate a company externally. As far as getting the results of each phone call and getting your services credited back, the easiest thing to say is a lot of people have 10-minute outages on program that will be shown again. The first thing they ask for is a month of credit. Believe me, if any such results were ever released all that would happen is the results would end up changing so that you would see a whole lot less crediting.
There is HelloPeter http://www.hellopeter.com/ but it is currently very South African in nature, even though it seems to be international.