The end of the Customer Street era

Following BT's £20 Million purchase of our business and after an enjoyable handover of Customer Street to the BT management team I have decided, along with the other founder, Mark Hallam to leave Customer Street, the business we started in 2001 to explore other opportunites.

I wish BT and the team of wonderful people who I have worked with for the last 7 years every success taking the business forward. I am proud that we were able to enjoy growing our business to a size where a company of the quality of BT felt that their next big step in the directory market would be a purchase of our business.

Customer Street is a hitwise award winner...again!

Once again I am proud to hear that Customer Street's Ufindus.com directory has won another Hitwise award. This quarter Ufindus.com has risen two places to third in the rankings behind only Google and Yell.com, even three places ahead of our illustrious parent company, BT.com with their phonebook site!

Well done to the marketing team at Customer Street and I know that there is more to come when we launch our new range of products with the help of the guys at BT Directories.

Rapidsite 3 is born

It's official, we have now begun to put a limited number of customers on to our new Customer Street Rapidsite 3 website builder platform which has been 18 months in development (nearly 12 months overdue) and we are really proud that BT Directories are considering adopting this tool as their standard website builder and content management system in the near future.

Rapidsite is as I have said before, a ground breaking product in website development through it's ability to produce custom styled fully CSS based sites and then enable a basic user with almost no computer skills to maintain, update, optimise and add to their site.

The best thing is that it is free to all our customers old and new and will soon start rolling out on an upgrade program.

My first week as an employee of Customer Street, a dvision of BT

Well there goes the first week since Customer Street became a wholly owned subsidiary of BT and exciting it has been. We always knew that the products we provided at Customer Street were market leading and it is pleasing to learn that BT amongst a large group of suitors realised this too.

This week has been a hectic round of meetings between my Customer Street teams and BT's directories management team and we have sketched out a very rough plan for the future of our two companies that will see some serious challenges to market leaders in several fields of the new media business.

Customer Street will become a significant part of the engine room at BT Directories and we will see some further expansion of the operations here with more support, sales and development jobs.

What's more, BT directories already have a talented team with ideas of their own that will help Customer Street achieve our goals more quickly.

I look forward to updating you with our new ideas during the coming months.

BT Buys Customer Street

Sorry I have been a little quiet of late but now I can talk about the work that has been going on behind the scenes so once again take Customer Street forward.

BT plc today announced that they purchased Ufindus (Customer Street) for £20,000,000 which is the culmination of almost a years work to find a new parent company that could help make Customer Street the size that all the team here wish it to be.

In particular both myself and Mark Hallam, the founding directors are delighted that our work has attracted one of the worlds most respected brands to purchase our business and we believe this speaks volumes of the quality of work we now carry out here.

We hope our customers will enjoy the benefits that will eventually be forthcoming as we integrate Ufindus as part of this fantastic organisation.

Record Month for the Customer Street network

Sorry to have not kept in touch during the month of May and June but we have been working furiously on a special project to further enhance the success of the Customer Street network, news of which will follow soon I hope.

In the meantime both May and then June have been record months in terms of users on the network. In total during June 2008 11,433,708 searches (or should I say finds) were carried out across our network. In fact because of the increases in traffic we have been seeing I have had to authorise a substantial investment in further additions to our search technology platform to cope with demand.

If you are a user, thank you for all your support. We try hard at Customer Street to make the platform useful to you.

If you are a subscriber, again thank you but we hope you are enjoying the increased traffic levels via your adverts. We will never stop pressing hard to increase traffic levels further and make Customer Street the largest network in Europe.

Evidence of Customer Street customer satisfaction increases

I am always happy to see the regular postbag of emails and letters from people thanking us for what we do for them. During the last 18 months the level of improvement in the value proposition has seen this rise from a dribble to a regular stream of compliments and anecdotal evidence is nice to suggest to me that my team is doing a good job.

This week however I was buoyed this week by the news from our finance team that Customer Street has achieved record sales last month and also more importantly for me and my team on customer service we have had the best month ever for customer renewals, fifty percent higher than any previous month. This is I believe a clear sign of the value that the majority of our customer base places on their subscription and we value that and continue to make strides to improve still further. As I have stated before, my team at Customer Street really care and are passionate about the service we provide and we are pleased that our efforts to improve service (which frankly wasn't great in the past) is now reflected by the increasing satisfaction levels of our customers.