A new exciting era for the founders and former directors of Ufindus.com

We are proud to announce that the the founders and former directors of Ufindus.com and Customer Street have recently launched Contentys Ltd and are now working on a hugely exciting internet product. Keep any eye on our blog at to find out more.

The end of the Ufindus 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.

My blog has moved

My blog has now moved to my Customer Street Blog

Traffic doubles on the Ufindus network

Whilst our competitors spend their time developing their strategies to find something wrong with Ufindus, we have been hard at work developing and improving our systems to cope with our increased sales and doubling of traffic.

Increased sales at Ufindus? Yes despite the barrage of criticism during the past couple of years(some of which we certainly were due but much of which was posted by jealous competitors too) we have managed to increase our sales by 17% during the last year. Thankfully following much hard work we now have the systems and people in place to provide a world class service. Indeed despite the huge jump in our sales we have actually reduced profits. We are proud of this because it reflects the commitment to our customers by way of our increased spending and the results certainly show.

Doubling of Traffic at Ufindus? Yes, whilst most of our competitors have been desperate to tell people the faults with Ufindus, our traffic has been steadily growing. Take Ufindus.com and check it out on a site such as Alexa traffic rankings. Just one of our sites that is doing extremely well. Then multiply that by at least a factor of at least 10 to account for the other 120 sites we have in our portfolio, driving traffic to our customers sites. Ufindus Ltd certainly has now, one of the largest and busiest networks in the UK.

Notwithstanding all the extra sales and extra delivery of products we have managed to sort out the back end systems at Ufindus and deliver as I promised we would a turn around in the company's service to our clients. I am very proud of all my team.

One of my key appointments when I took over the role of Ufindus Operations Director around 8 months ago was to understand how to deal with the more serious issues that were raised by customers and to this end I established our accountability department. Some of our critics mocked us but this has been a fantastic addition to our team under the watchful and compassionate team leader that is Graham Armstrong. Many people will have seen his postings on his own blog which I read avidly and find interesting and humorous often.

Graham has worked hard along with his colleagues and the management team at Ufindus to put in place some extensive controls to deal with any serious issues. It is a credit to Graham and the rest of the support team that in his first month of operation, and the first month I took over this role, we had 73 serious (we categorised them as such) complaints where we had let down the customer. During June we have had just two so far. Out of a customers base of over 50,000 businesses that is not bad.

We won't rest on our laurels though. We still have many improvements and enhancements to make to our service to make it even better and no doubt Graham will talk about those during the coming months.

The Ufindus Network reaches 120 sites

Did you know that Ufindus own over 120 brands in the directory and search market. Along with our three national brands that cover nearly all of the 2 million businesses in the UK we have 118 individual different search and directory brands in specialists markets, for example if you are looking for a kennels for your dog when you go on your holidays you may come across The Kennels and Catteries portal.

This network grows by around 2-3 portals per week making us easily the largest directory network in Europe.

Now when you think of Ufindus don't just think of Ufindus. Its amazing what is going on behind the scenes. We have been building the Ufindus network for over 4 years and all this work is beneficial to our customers.

The network grows

The Ufindus team has always worked hard to provide the best results for our customers. During the last six months we have worked hard to improve many of the parts of our business where we acknowledged we outgrew our systems and procedures and I am proud to say that things have changed.

In fact they have changed so much that our development teams are not now dealing with fixing systems and repairing things we did wrong. Its now all about rolling out some of the market leading systems we are capable of.

The next twelve months are all about focus on positive initiatives for our customers and I am delighted that we have been able to launch the first big step in this process last week.

We have now launched two brand new directories under the brands Smilelocal.com and Moreuk.com which has given us a further presence in the competitive search market.

In addition we have launched a number of new initiatives to promote our customers own websites across all the major search engines and the month of May was by far the most successful in the networks history. June is showing signs of beating May by a large margin too.

Keep up the good work, even if I do say so myself.

Commitment to Ufindus Customers

At Ufindus I have been stating for some time now that we are working hard to improve our reputation and systems to ensure our customers get the administration support to go with our excellent products. It is clear to me that we have made substantial progress and continue to make further strides every day.

Ufindus grew very quickly to one of the UK's largest internet brands and I am afraid that our previous systems did not keep pace with the growth of the business. This lead to a culture where customers expected us to let them down, not call them back, not answer their questions and generally be very unhelpful, all after enduring long queue times to have the phone answered by us. I am confident now that this is not the case.

I sat with the Ufindus support senior management team today and we watched the call queues to see typical wait times and during the 90 minutes we were in this meeting there were no queues.

In addition we reviewed the Ufindus QAD workflow queues and the amount of oustanding issues were incredibly low. In total we had just 56 waiting cases in our pending queues which had not been assigned to an agent to deal with. These, which are a fraction of the typical outstanding work in the past were to be split between over 30 agents. Typically it takes on the new Ufindus support centre agents around 20 minutes to effectively deal with a case and so we have about 3 hours work in total excluding cases that agents are already dealing with.

That's pretty impressive and even more so when you consider that we log 100% of cases against our previous support centre that dealt with around 80% of calls.

Again, I hope the Ufindus customer base is feeling the difference and I know they are. We are getting plenty of feedback now that the changes we have made at Ufindus are meaning our team is much more responsive to our customers than you would find at an average support centre in this or most other industries.

100% support at Ufindus

I have been posting for ages about how good support would be with our new systems and although I am sure we have some way to go still but at Ufindus we have made a significant change during the last three weeks .

Ufindus has always previously operated on the traditional support centre model with customers calling and at busy times people getting one of those annoying queues. For us it was very difficult to balance supply and demand as all traditional call centres know. As I posted previously we have developed a brand new system for Ufindus support that completely changes how we operate and this is now mostly implemented across all our teams. The system allows extensive tracking and quality control of agents work which is of course very significant but something even more significant is the change to how we answer the phones I believe.

In the past, Ufindus would traditionally answer around 80% of calls with the remainder of callers hanging up because they preferred not to wait. Sometimes this was because of long wait times but often it was because customers expected long wait times so as soon as they heard a message they hung up. Now at Ufindus we answer over 98.5% of calls in under 25 seconds including queue time and each and every issue is logged immediately into QAD and each case is not closed until the customers says it is resolved. In the rare case that a Ufindus support agent closes a case before the customer is satisfied, the case is reopened when the customer lets us know and the agent is penalised and will have to answer to their manager!

To summarise we have gone from answering about 80% of calls before March 24th to answering over 98.5% of calls following the introduction of the new support centre and QAD. I am very proud of the team who are working hard at Ufindus to make sure we go from being a company with a reputation for unsatisfactory levels of support to a company that has excellent levels of customer support.

I know our customers are now feeling the benefit and there are yet more changes afoot. The management team at Ufindus realise that it is no good having a world class product without world class support and we aim to ensure that is what we deliver in the future. We have very high standards and have learned a lot from our customers and are putting those lessons into practice throughout the business.

Budget Planning

I am currently heavily involved in budget planning for 2007-2008 and onwards for the Ufindus part of the group.

What is really apparent is that we should be able to provide our much improved levels of support while actually cutting costs to the business. In fact the introduction of QAD has meant that we actually have gone from dealing with 85% of calls on average to 100% now. In addition all calls to our support centre are answered in seconds not minutes. That is some turn around.

QAD helps us balance our work flow and challenges our teams to be more responsible towards customers as any dissatisfaction from customers is directly reflected in the agents performance tables. This is most certainly having a direct improvement on the quality of our dealings with our customers and our levels of complaints have plummeted.

We still have a lot to do but we are sure our customers are feeling the benefit of our improvements and we are feeling the benefit of this much more focused support approach. In the past Ufindus support was provided alongside Easyspace support, two very different businesses. Now all Ufindus support is provided by Ufindus and any feedback about failings in our processes are directly reported back to the management team for a more hands on and efficient approach. This in turn will eventually lead to cost savings for the business I am sure.

Ufindus Rapidsite work is well underway

Following my posting a week or so ago we are well under way with the new version Ufindus Rapidsite and rather than me posting updates on here you can read about its progress directly from the developer in charge of the project. His name is Stuart also and he is very enthusiastic about making this a market leading product that will of course be free to all Ufindus customers.

Ufindus Rapidsite Development blog