New-look site to help ease the customer blues
Hellopeter promises a ‘vastly improved’ experience
I USE online consumer complaints portal Hellopeter.com regularly. It just doesn’t make sense not to; it’s a great (and free) snapshot of how companies are faring, based on the experiences of customers.
I’ve relied on it when buying a new fridge and dishwasher; the fewer gripes I find linked to a brand’s after-sales service, the better. When complaints about shoddy customer support run into pages on the website, you know to steer clear.
Professionally it’s helpful too. The nature of some reader complaints often hints at a far broader problem; a quick check on Hellopeter can confirm this.
But the site is not without its drawbacks; there are too many cut-and-paste responses for my liking and I would like to see a function that automatically raises red flags on serial offenders.
Things look set to change, however, after ownership of the website changed hands in November last year.
New chief executive Alon Rom knows a thing or two about service delivery — his background includes executive directorships in Mr Delivery and Mr Delivery Express, and more recently he became a shareholder in Takealot.com.
The Power Report caught up with him a few months into his new post: What are Hellopeter’s core offerings and values? For the consumer, it provides a voice to share brand and service experiences in an open forum, to draw a response from corporates and provide a network of information for consumers to make betterinformed choices.
The corporate gets an opportunity to engage with the consumer and to showcase and differentiate its customer service levels and utilise independent insights. What plans do you have for Hellopeter? The website will exponentially evolve during 2015. Ultimately, the vision is to connect consumers and brands to an independent information network on the world’s leading online consumer advocacy and corporate reputation management platform.
The core business will always remain the same: reviews by consumers — complaints and compliments — and some great added value services for corporates with the idea of assisting consumers. Our new site will be a vastly improved user experience.
In addition, we will be launching a new mobile website with a native mobile application to follow. You mention exciting new products and services for consumers and corporates. What exactly? I can’t disclose the full vision at this stage, but some of the new features for the consumer include the ability to post a review in lightning-fast time and share it on social media platforms, and to compare businesses quickly and benchmark them using the BETTER CHOICES: Alon Rom, the recently appointed CEO of Hellopeter.com Hellopeter Index, which will be the industry standard barometer for measuring the health of an organisation’s customer service.
Hellosocial will be our social platform that connects consumers. Each time a review is posted or a comment is made, friends will be able to follow, share and comment on the review. Consumers can follow their favourite businesses, make friends and ask them for recommendations. Through their interactions with the site, they will be able to make informed decisions based on real-time, industry-verified information.
And to make it even easier, we’ll recommend great brands and businesses for consumers to follow and help them decide which ones to avoid.
Hellochat will be our live chat application. When a corporate enables “live review”, users can connect with it in a live chat as soon as they have published their reviews.
Consumers will also be able to utilise the live chat for Q&As with corporates. The idea here is to provide a platform for consumers to engage with corporates a lot sooner than they ordinarily would . . . and get answers more quickly and efficiently.
For corporates, we will be launching a customer service relationship management dashboard, a monitoring tool that allows true customisation, integration of a business’s social media profiles, and realtime analysis of performance. When users publish their reviews, they will be able to share them on other social media platforms that they are connected to.
All consumers will be able to post comments on any review using social media and Hellosocial. Reviews will also be published to Hellopeter.com’s Facebook and Twitter profiles.
By activating social sharing,
PLEASE BE PATIENT: Hellopeter provides an alternative to call centres any time an update is added to reviews, either by the corporate responding or people commenting, we’ll share it across all of a consumer’s social networks. What percentage of top South African companies are among the 1 800-plus companies signed up? It’s difficult to give you a hard number, but we certainly have a large number of JSE-listed corporates that have grown with the brand over the past 14 years. I’ve seen more than 30 JSE-listed corporates to present our vision and obtain their valuable input. Many companies signed up offer nothing more than a cut-and-paste response to complaints and make no attempt to fix the systemic weaknesses in their systems. In my opinion, it’s always better to publish a personalised response. From the writer’s perspective, as long as the corporates that post generic responses acknowledge the review and deal with the issue or issues quickly and effectively offline, it should result in a change of sentiment. The problem is that both consumers and corporates don’t know the status of reviews. The new platform will be able to track this. I had a recent case in which a reader was threatened with an urgent interdict for alleged defamation if he did not remove a comment he had made on the site. He was not assisted timeously or effectively by staff and ended up with a costly order against him. Will you make the Hellopeter team more accessible to consumers? Absolutely — consumer centricity is a fundamental core value of the new leadership of Hellopeter.com. Would you encourage consumer group activism via the site? We currently allow comments to be written via Facebook plugins. With the new social sharing integration, this will become even more prevalent.
Tune in to Power FM 98.7’s ‘Power Breakfast’ at 8.50am tomorrow to hear more from Megan
Sunday Smile
AT the Consumer Goods and Services Ombud code, which is now enforceable by law. Suppliers in this sector must respond to complaints within tight timeframes and risk decisions going against them if they fail to do so. Worse, any lack of cooperation can be held against them at the National Consumer Commission and/or Tribunal.
Sunday Snarl
AT Cape Town’s MyCiTi bus service, which repeatedly overcharges commuter Lia Ziegler, then takes up to six months to refund her when she complains. “What happens to the hundreds of thousands of commuters who have no time or access to e-mail to complain?” said Ziegler.