Work experience at customer street

Im freddie and i have spent 2 weeks at Customer Street doing a work placement for school and this is what i feel of my 2 weeks.

My work experience at Customer Street gave me a vast understanding of how the work place is managed. I looked at every aspect of working life from front line sales, to senior management. I felt that the working relationship between management and the staff was reflected by the relaxed feeling in the office. The management would regularly be walking through the offices chatting to the receptionist or the web designers in a very friendly and relaxed manor.

The first hand experience of every department made me realise that the people that worked the hardest certainly got rewarded adequately. I was surprised by the amount of grief they got from cold calling businesses when they were offering such a good product at a respectable price. It’s not as if they’re ringing peoples homes at 8 30 pm when they’re settling down with their family because that is when you have every to hang up!

Every department is managed by a team leader who really knows how to control everyone and encourage everyone to work. They regularly hold meetings in individual departments announcing incentives to encourage staff to over perform. The things they can win are days off or spot prizes.

The experience has really influenced my response to tele-sale calls at home and to not just hang up on them. I have really enjoyed my experience at customer street and now feel comfortable to approach other company’s if they are going to be as half as friendly as customer street have!
Freddie Shaw

Customer Street Support add another tool to the box

Over recent weeks the Customer Street support team have had the benefit of  getting to use their new wiki to help out with accessing up to date product or system information whilst they are on a call to the customer.

Following on from this we have now developed another in house tool to add to heir system. Instead of having to wait 4-5 hours for changes to directory listings to go live due to the provisioning process, we have now given all our Customer Support and Customer Relations agents the ability to be able to change any towns or categories associated with a customers listing immediately.

The same also applies to key phrases associated with the account. So if a customer wants to shift the emphasis of the area they cover from Lancaster to Preston we can now do it immediately. The obvious benefits are that the directory is updated in an instant and that means this increases the search engines such as Yahoo and Google picking up on it even sooner when they spider the web looking for new content.

If you have anything with your account that our support team can help you with then please give them a call on 0845 338 0500.

Customer Street Forum

A couple of months ago I wrote about our Customer Street Forum. A great place for anyone with a comment about Customer Street and its associated brands like Smile Local, More UK and UFindUs, to get online and make comments or find out answers to any questions then may have.

If you haven’t stopped by the forum yet then feel free to visit and set up your own user id so that you can add your own contribution. Its a great place to air opinions, talk about our services or make suggestions about features you would like to see in our products.

If you have an opinion on how the current “credit crunch” is likely to affect your business then let us know, likewise if you have put measures in place to fight off the ecomomic effects then why not use your forum as a place to exchange ideas.

The Customer Street team look forward to seeing you there.

Lost in Translation and the Art of Getting Your Message Across

One of my jobs here at Customer Street is helping to manage our online reputation. Reputation management is becoming more and more ingrained in the structure of most corporate organisations. Lets face it the internet is a very unforgiving place and in general terms people can go on to a site or forurm and say what they want safe in the knowledge that chances are no one will ever bother.

Probably one of the worlds best known and most respected ”corporate evangelists” is Robert Scoble. In the early part of this decade Scoble was tasked with the job of addressing certain issues that Microsoft had with regards to their online reputation. Through tackling the issues head on and engaging in open discussion with Microsoft’s core market he helped facilitate a huge turn round in public opinion.

By not responding businesses leave themselves open to being subjected to exaggerated and deliberately misleading customer testimony. In a call review recently I discovered that a customer who had described our sales agent as being rude and abusive before he “calmly hung up” was actually the one being abusive before he abruptly ended the call.

After 20 months of being the public face of the Cusotmer Street and UFindUs accountability department I can say that there has been a huge difference to how the public perceive us. The reason for this is twofold. As a business we have invested huge amounts of time and effort in retraining staff and relocating our core support and billing functions. Obviously having a market leading product has helped too.

Our staff, from our sales force to our support teams, are so customer focused and all of them want to achieve  results for the customer by making sure that our customer service is the best that it can be.

The level of complaints coming in or being discussed on the internet is at an all time low, and I am pleased to say people who are reading postings from around the net and can actually see the significant changes that we have made. Each week I will get a few people who take the time to write to me directly as a result of seeing a posting that I have made instead of adding their own posting onto the web.

Of course paying lip service is no good at all, instead we are happy to acknowledge the issues and we are also prepared to deliver the goods. Many of our processes have been redesigned with the customer in mind and we try to make their dealings with us as easy as possible. As long as customers want to engage in discussions with us we will be there. We have also set up our own Customer Street Forum where people can come along and have their own say on things, good or bad.

I hope to see you there.

Online Spending is on the Increase

Credit crunch! What credit crunch?

Here at Customer Street we have seen our customer base increase during the first half of 2008. This would indicate that perhaps the smaller business is weathering the storm a little better than some of the bigger boys. We also mustn’t forget that many of the customers who appear on our Ufindus, Smile Local and More UK directories are also not retailers, they are tradesmen and perhaps this sector too has been able to withstand some of the current ecomonic pressures.

So, having read an interesting article on vnunet regarding online spending increasing it may be that the credit crunch is just affecting the high street and not online retailers. It mentions that one in every five pounds spent in the UK is spent online. These are truly amazing figures which few could have predicted only a few short years ago.

I also agree with them that, and this is backed up by comments from friends and family, that “internet shopping is just their normal way of doing things.” Increasing traffic figures for our range of directories, including UFindUs, back this up as well. 

The smart money would seem to indicate that investing in an effective online presence could be one way of bucking the trend and hopefully riding out the current stormy weather.

The Customer Street Wiki

One of the constant challenges that the support team at Customer Street face is keeping up to date with new procedures and information which they need in order to do their jobs. The internet is an ever changing place and as a result the information that we need to pass out to our staff also can change on a daily basis. Training manuals are out of date almost before they are printed.

Whether it is a change that Google has made or whether it is a change in the way we process information in order to deal with a customer more effectively we have a team of people who all need to know the latest information.

The Support Team have daily briefings to make sure this information is passed out to them but it they really need a permanent point of reference to access this information should they need to. As a result we will be rolling out out own internal Customer Support Team Wiki.

This updateable information library will make sure that within a few keystrokes they will be able to access anything they need, this not only makes the information we are using or giving out to our UFindUs and Customer Street account holders as up to date as possible, it also means that we have given our staff the knowledge to make sure they fix problems the first time round in the majority of cases.

Customer Service Starts at the Top at Customer Street

How are you feeling today? There’s no getting away from the fact that yesterday was a pretty miserable day looking out of the Customer Street office window and seeing the rain coming down by the bucket full. Today has been totally different. I spent a fair portion of the morning squinting at my pc screen as the sun made a welcome appearance.

This afternoon I have been able to get a fair amount done too. Since taking over the Human Resources department hers at Customer Street I have been balancing my Accountability role and the new HR role to try and achieve maximum output. It has also been a learning curve as well. But its better to be busy than not, I always worry when its quiet somehow.

Probably one of the busiest people in our business is Stuart Forrest our technical director. It amazes me how many things he can multi task at any one time. Another impressive thing is that hes also really down to earth and this probably accounts for his overwhelming passion to make sure Customer Street continues to achieve great things.

Today, I have noticed that Stuart has not only spent an hour out of his day walking round the different departments here at head office but he has spoken individually with around half of the staff in the office. Stuart’s interest is not only in our customers but also in our staff and whilst he says he doesn’t get to spend as much time as he would like with his staff he certainly likes to make you feel that you belong.

His hands on approach to running the business is appreciated by everyone and he will often pay particular attention to those staff who he doesnt get to deal with on a day to day basis. No one is too insignificant to be noticed.

This whole ethos really spreads right through in our general approach to customer service and this has never been more noticeable than now. 

UFindUs recieve another award from HitWise

With the bank holiday around the corner the mood in the office is really good. To round the week off nicely we can also announce that we have won another HitWise awardfor internet traffic, for the second quarter in a row.

For the first quarter of 2008 the UFindUsdirectory has been independently verified by HitWise who are an industry renowned provider of web traffic stats. There is no way that these figures can be questioned and the announcement by HitWise that we have over 1.92 million entries and over 1.4 of those are fully categorised entries help place UFindUs and Customer Street amongst the very top of our field within the UK.

An achievement to be proud of without a doubt. This can only emphasise the importance of online directories within the internet and ultimately the high regard it holds amongst end users. After all it is the huge volumes of traffic that our sites such as Smile Local, More UK and of course UFindUs achieve which allow us to provide fantastic results for our advertisers.

We are looking forward to the next quarter figures which hopefully will show similar if not better results.

Asda- Smarter Shopping? Customer Street think so

Even though I work for Customer Street, a major player on the internet, I have just had my first foray into the realms of Internet food shopping. Whats  more i was pleasantly surpirsed about two things.

Firstly how easy it was to do. I used a shopping portal called mysupermarket.com who cleverly compare the price of what you wantto buy from your chosen store with others on their site. They list Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Opodo. I was pleased that with Asda I saved over £8 compared to shopping at Tescoand £11 with Sainsbury’s. The other great thing is that when you click “checkout” it then imports all your purchases into the Asda home shopping site for you. It is as easy as that.

This really reaffirmed to me just how much we are using the Internet for all sorts of services. Things that 5 years ago you just wouldn’t have done online are now common place and businesses are still only now waking up to this reality. We are starting to spend less in the high streets and more online, the reason being the great value and convenience that it offers.

The other thing that is not specifically internet related,but is worth mentioning, is the delivery driver. She was courteous, introduced herself, asked if this was my first time internet shopping with Asda and then when this was confirmed she spent extra timegoing through the order  with me and explaining everything I needed to now about.

There is no doubt she went the extra mile and I imagine she does this with everyone, but the thing that she doesn’t realise is that she is probably one of the best ambassadors for Asda that they can have. I know how easy it is for people like this to go un-noticed and so I did make a point of calling into Asda and telling their customer services what a great service I had recived from their driver.

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all, every once in a while, made the effort and caught someone doing something right and then told as many people as possible?

Cruising the Med and the lessons learnt

On this Customer Street blog a few weeks ago I wrote about my dealings with both my Travel Agent and Cruise Line on the run up to a much awaited holiday. Well now I am back i felt it was worth while to follow up on that blog and set the record straight.
Being the Accountability Manager here at Customer Street I get to see as part of my job the things that go wrong with our service. Over the last couple of years we have worked tirelessly to try to get these reduced to a trickle and I can say it has worked. At present, even after my weeks sojourn, I find only one outstanding job in my list and that is there because I am awaiting a response from the customer.
I am pleased to say that my problems before we set sail were sorted and the whole experience has not put me off from sailing with them again. From start to finish the organisation of the transfers to and from the ship, embarkation process, the staff, the ship and everything NCL touched was faultless.
The crew went out of their way to always acknowledge you, and when you needed to discuss anything they listened to what you said and always made sure that they confirmed what had just been agreed. Everywhere you looked there were people hoovering, polishing, tidying and checking every aspect of the ship and its service.
I was even surprised by the number of times the Captain and the senior members of the crew were around to say hello or stop and talk if you wanted to. Attention to detail is everything on a NCL cruise and I cannot praise them enough.
Having said that it doesn’t not matter how good you are there will always be those who are ready to be critical. I have seen that recently NCL have now settled an equal opportunities case brought by 7 crew members, a story which has gone right round the world thanks to news feeds. They have also had far more damaging publicity from the fact that last week a passenger fell from one of the balconies on a ship sailing off the American Coast.
The first stories that surfaced were that how could a passenger fall off the ship, implications that the cruise line were at fault etc. Then it was the turn of the partner of the woman who fell to come under the spotlight, then the FBI were reviewing the security footage which shows the accident actually happen. The fact that the footage is available is great news for the cruise line and the partner I would have thought.
Perhaps for the partner, but not for NCL. One article was questioning why did the ship have cameras which could possibly capture the incident. They were questioning whether the cameras could see onto the balcony and it almost made out that they thought that they were trying to spy on the guests. Then there was talk about NCL saying they have camera in strategic locations in all public areas but not in the staterooms. Again this is a very positive comment but the context it comes across in makes it sound all very Big Brother.
This goes to show that even something very innocent and undeniably tragic can be subtly conveyed in a way which cast s doubt where there should be none. I thought that the cameras on ship, which were not particularly hidden, made me feel very safe and as I had nothing to hide I did not feel their presence was a particular problem.
Being part of an organisation which has had its fair share of criticism leveled at it, and much of it unfounded, I can only advocate that none of us should be tempted to read more into things than we need to.