Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Where are Customer Service Rating Systems?

Posted by Cliff on from the purchase-is-only-the-start-of-the-relationship dept.

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?"

8 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. BBB by Ruff_ilb · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
    1. Re:BBB by eggoeater · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I love the BBB; filing a complaint with them usually resolves the issue.
      Unfortunatly, the BBB doesn't really rate "customer service".
      eg. Metrocall really screwed up my account about 10 years ago and it wasn't until I filed a BBB complaint that it got straightened out.
      Obviously this has nothing to do with customer service and the BBB doesn't want to get complaints that "some customer service rep was rude to me."
      The BBB deals with situations in which a specific outcome is desired by the plaintif (eg. Correct the balance on my account; refund my money; etc..)


      I'm a techie at a LARGE call center in a finance company. We use Gallup surveys to rate our customer service and then we publish those scores. Customer service is important in commercial and retail finance; that's why we publish those scores. Finance will sell you a product (mortgage, checking, brokerage) but the company doesn't make money unless you keep your account open.

      Unlike finance, most companies don't see customer service as a money-making opportunity. (Many times, it isn't.) For instance, if you buy a video card from company X, then they already have your money. Once company X has your money, their incentive to make you happy is gone. They will provide you with the cheapest customer service they can and they sure as hell aren't going to spend a fortune on things like quality coaches and Gallup surveys.

      Here's the moral of the story:
      Good customer service is VERY EXPENSIVE for any company and, because there's very little brand-loyalty left in the consumer market, it rarely leads to repeat customers.
      Good customer service is only viewed as a necessity for companies that need to keep you as an ongoing customer.
      The finance industry, and other "service" industries, has figured out that retaining customers is far cheaper then aquireing new ones.

      --
      $7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
    2. Re:BBB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Speaking as the owner of a small company that has repeatedly had threats of complaints and complaints themselves used in efforts to scam us, I would also say that you need to take what it is in those reports with a grain of salt. This is routine situation for us:

      Impatient and unreasonable jackass orders on Friday before a 3 day weekend. Because impatient and unreasonable jackass is both too stupid to theorize that maybe he's not getting a reply to his email because of the holiday weekend and is too impatient to take the time to read the news and announcements on our website that we will not be around for the holiday weekend, impatient and unreasonable jackass fires off letters not just to the BBB, but to other complaint websites on the net.

      So, we get back in Tuesday and have 13 emails from impatient and unreasonable jackass. The last of which is practically drooling with rage as he cherishes telling us that he's reported us for "scamming" him(even though his card is not charged until we manually process the order, which we had not done because we were not there). So now, we have to go to these websites, where he has taken liberties with the chain of events which have morphed from 3 days into weeks and sometimes months(I'm not kidding nor exagerating), and tell our side of the story. He now gets enraged that we would dare tell the truth about the situation and then adds more bullshit to the story and it explodes into a big drama over a 30 dollar item. Half of the impatient and unreasonable jackasses will then let us know that they will take back all their comments if we send them free stuff.

      So, having been through this one too many times, we no longer reply on those sites and the moment someone does this to us, their order is canceled, their money refunded if it had already been charged, and asked never to shop with us again. We've tried being nice, by offering deeply discounted and in two cases, absolutely free products just to try to make them happy, but we've found this only leads to repeat bullshit.

      So remember that when you read some of the complaints on the BBB and other sites. The scammers and ripoff artists use those sites as leverage in their attempts to rip off small businesses.

  2. Reputation systems by Colin+Smith · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Deleted
  3. Gripe2Ed by musicon · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:google? by Meshach · · Score: 2, Insightful
    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.
    The trouble with this stratagy is you are getting a selective bias: only persons who have had a exceptionally bad experience will actually write about it in a publically indexed blog. If all you go by is google all you will get is the horror stories.

    A better stratagy would be to look for some third party statistics on the service offered
    --
    "Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
    Aldous Huxley
  5. GetHuman.com by IanDanforth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

  6. There really isn't one by scronline · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.