There are a couple of sites that have been launched recently that show just how much truth and transparency towards stakeholders is vital to the modern company - both in terms of customers and employees.
These two sites are Plebble.com and GlassDoor.com
Plebble was set up with one main purpose in mind - to improve the level of service and value for money provided by every business and other organisation in the UK. It does this by giving consumers a voice on customer service issues and by using the power of the internet to join together consumer voices in a powerful, easy to use and easy-to-understand format for other consumers and businesses themselves to use.
It's about sharing information simply and quickly - but highly effectively. It's about empowering you, giving you choice and enabling you to make the right decisions about which businesses to use. And, in the end, it's about making businesses more aware of and accountable for levels of service.
Plebble.com is a great example of how customer ratings can make or break your business. The more people use it, the greater attention will be focused on your company and how it compares to the others in your field. If you don't make the grade, even by a few points, it may swing potential customer's favour to someone else, losing you valuable business.
However, rather than seeing this as all doom and gloom and a threat to your company, Plebble should be seen as an opportunity for your company to gauge just how good your customer service is. If your rating is low, try speaking to the Plebble community about what went wrong and find out how you can improve. And make it personal - no one likes being spammed with corprate speak. Spending just one hour of your time with a few unsatisfied customers can really improve your service offering and give you plenty of insights that you otherwise would never get.
For more information on Plebble, take a look at their short introduction video here or read an article from James Patterson, one of Plebble's founders, on what Web 2.0 means for your business here.
GlassDoor is building a career and workplace community where anyone can find and anonymously share real-time reviews, ratings and salary details about specific jobs for specific employers – for free.
The idea behind Glassdoor is simple: You tell me your salary, and I’ll tell you mine. The site collects company reviews and real salaries from employees of large companies and displays them anonymously for all members to see.
The idea is to collect as much detailed salary information and feedback for every job title at a company so that job seekers can know how to evaluate an offer, and current employees can see how they are doing relative to their peers. “When the annual compensation review comes,” says CEO Robert Hohman, “you need to know what your market value is.” Or you can just live vicariously through others.
At the moment, the site only contains major tech companies and American corporations, but will undoutbedly expand in the coming months to include a much wider range of companies. For example, anyone can see the full details for four companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco), but beyond that it is a give-to-get model. You need to post your own review to see the other reviews.
Each company and CEO gets a rating. Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s approval rating is 89 percent, while the overall satisfaction rating for Google as a company to work at is 4.2 out of 5. Microsoft’s satisfaction rating is exactly the same, whereas Yahoo’s is not surprisingly lower at 3.8. The more honest responses the site collects from any given company, the more accurate the results will be.
Beyond the ratings and salary information, Glassdoor can be used for companies to reveal just what their employees think of them through the in-depth reviews that employees give anonymously. Reading through all of them gives a nice cross section of attitudes at the vairous companyies and probably gives more realistic views than the painfully artificial employee feedback programmes that most companies implement.
If Glassdoor can get people to reveal their salaries and their thoughts about the inner workings of their companies, and Plebble can get customers to rate their experiences with a company's services, the internet’s culture of truth and transparency will claim another stronghold.
Is your company ready for the potential impact of these two sites? What other applications can these two sites have towards your company?
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