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.

Customer Street Italian style

The first half of this week I spent in Italy courtesy of Air Miles (I had saved enough up for free flights to Naples!) so I didn't get much done apart from trudging round the sights of Pompei and Herculaneum. These are truly amazing archaeological sights that I think most people would find fascinating. It is amazing just how sophisticated the Roman's were two thousand years ago.

Back to work we have been focusing some more on the testing of our new Rapidsite version which I am closely involved with and is approaching conclusion. We are all excited about the pending new release which will help Customer Street advertisers make more of their internet presence and improve their return on their investment with us.

We have had a number of meetings focusing around further improvements to our customer service that have arisen through feedback from our customers. At Customer Street we will never stop striving to improve our service.

My week at Customer Street

This week has been a quiet week for me with a lot of catching up on the progress of existing projects at Customer Street.

As I have expressed previously we are getting quite close to completing our class leading content management system and site design product which is a replacement for our current version called Rapidsite.

My colleagues in the development department have made significant progress in what has been a long and painful road for us. We certainly bit off a little more than we could initially chew in our quest to build the first site builder that was fully CSS, WAI and W3C compliant. Thankfully after much work behind the scenes we are now implementing the front end of this application and I look forward to rolling this free application out to all our customers very soon.

In addition we have been working hard on upgrades to our billing systems and our new search rankings reporting engine and I have attended a couple of meetings on these subjects in the last week.

Finally I have been involved in the renewing of our lease of our Blackpool site committing Customer Street to a further five year period for one of our most successful offices.

Customer Street is the new world order

I was driving to work today and in the middle of the road next to a block of flats were a number of Yellow Pages flapping around in the wind and sodden wet. It reminded me that whenever I go into any flats or apartments anywhere in the country I always notice that there are usually stacks of them in the lobby waiting to be collected. The lack of collection is a sign of the times. People just dont want this Yellow Book but Yellow Pages plc keep on delivering them.

Can you imagine if every household left them on their step and Yellow Pages plc had a duty to collect the ones that had not been picked up. That would be bloody expensive. If they then had to pay an envorinmental tax for every one not claimed their business model would surely be even more difficult than their share price fall currently suggests it is perceived by the city.

Lets face it, there is a new world order out there that is electronic, up to the minute data. Who wants books that are so out of date even when they are published. Customer Street is part of that New World Order. The environmental benefits of replacing old world businesses (travel agents with their brochures and directory publishers with their wedges of wasted paper are just two examples) are huge. Imagine the wasted paper that is being saved by people booking their holidays online. Just imagine then how much could be saved once Yellow Pages give up on the paper book. The only thing is that that we will have to find something else to wedge doors open with!

I discussed this with my colleague who happens to live in such an apartment and he had coincidentally written an item on his blog about this very subject which you can read (Mark Nichols blog) that talks about this issue.

In this ever greener world remember that Customer Street has always been the greener directory!