Hello Everyone,

I am part of a group developing a customer experience review website

www.yourrightness.com

It is an opportunity for customers to leave independent reviews and ratings for services received. The site is dedicated primarily to customer service.

So far we have received mixed reviews, some people like our concept and others are a bit skeptical. Any open and honest feedback on improvements to the site and or the sites applicability in today's current market place will be greatly appreciated.

It seems to me that there should be a purpose, and that's what I'm missing here. I think I understand your concept (and I would fall on the liking it end of the spectrum), but I don't get the purpose.

If it is to have a site for people to vent about their CS experiences, I would have to respond: so what? There are already tons of forums and other outlets for people to express themselves.

If it is to gather the feedback and present it to the organization in question, then I would have a gazillion other questions. What's in it for the consumer? What's in it for the organization? How, logistically, will you pull this off (especially the presentation of the collected feedback to the organization)? I could go on and on.

If it is to serve as something similar to Angie's List...share information about the services you received so others can make decisions about using said services....then, I don't know. Your concept might work, it might not.

I guess my main point is that I expected the site to tell me the purpose. It did not. Or if it does, I cannot find it (and I'm pretty sure I navigated the whole thing).

Different subject: Since the site is young, I didn't anticipate that there would be much feedback out there, but I still found myself getting frustrated that I could not find a comment to help me get a flavor for how it is being used, what your users are expecting, experiencing, etc.

I finally decided that people would have plenty of feedback right now about banks, so selected that category and actually did find one entry.

I would suggest that the site present a count of entries on the categories and subcategories. It could be a simple count in parenthesis:
Airlines (52)
Virgin (3)
Southwest (12)
Northwest (7)

It would save people from searching blindly, getting frustrated. Could be just me...when I find a new-to-me site that allows feedback (like this CSM forum), I tend to lurk and read for a while before committing myself and posting. My experience on your site this afternoon would have caused me to not post, not bookmark the site, and probably never return.

I also had a reaction to the domain name. But that may come more from my ethics, morals, core values...than from the name you selected. Just raises my neck hairs a bit...causes me to move towards a defensive position. How can I better state this? "Your rightness" triggers a reaction that leads to "Customer is always right" and as a life-long member of the CS community, I know that is not a factual statement. Like I said, it's probably me and my junk impacting this and not your site and name selection.

Overall, as stated, I like the concept...just feel it needs to be fleshed out more. The site itself is attractive....ez to navigate, simple, uncluttered.

Good luck!

KarenSB, thanks for your poignant analysis. It will prove very helpful going forward!!

YR, Karen provided some good feedback on your site. In addition to the site's name, I was thrown by the text on the hyperlink that takes you to enter the site: "get unplugged"? I didn't make the connection. I agree with Karen on the ease of use, site's purpose, etc. How do you plan to market the site?

TheCustomerServiceModel,
Even thought the caption under the logo states 'the voice of the customer...unplugged", we have clearly not done a good job in tying that to the 'start unplugging' button. We will work to correct that lapse.

As far as marketing, we have a few ideas that we are working with, the traditional suspects, Google, Yahoo advertisements, but those have not been providing a return on the investment that will justify continued use. We are also looking to other non-traditional methods, Facebook groups etc and we will definitely be open to suggestions.

KarenSB,
The first phase of the site roll out is geared towards getting customers to use the site as their premier source of customer service reviews. The second phase will involve redeploying the sites architecture to capture the reviews in a way that we can perform a statistical analysis of the data that will be useful to the service providers to track their performance and highlight areas that need significant/immediate improvement. In principle, it may seem like another twist on Angie's List, but my response to that is: we would not have a "Google" today if its founders focused on the fact that there was already a Yahoo!

To your point on the 'customer not always being right'; I couldn't not agree with you more, however, being on the receiving end extremely disrespectful customer service makes me feel like service providers owe their paying (and non-paying) customers a certain amount of dignity and respect. If our site gets customers a little more respect then our job is done.

I really appreciate both your comments on the simplicity and easy of use of the site. It was a very very significant point in out design process we were significantly opposed to creating another cluttered site with confusing navigation. Your comments mean a lot and we will work harder to make sure we improve the usability of the site.

Thank you kindly,
YR