Background

ServiceTick was formed by a group of internet and call centre pioneers. We’ve been involved in the internet since its early days.

The internet had been built around a foundation of companies assuming they knew what their customers wanted. Many tried to simply overlay offline processes onto the internet.

But it was becoming clear that the rules were changing. Consumers had started to interact with each other in a way nobody would have thought possible a few years ago. Through blogging to social networking to giving feedback on websites like Ebay or Amazon, consumers have become empowered. If they can’t tell you about your brand, your products or your service levels, they’ll simply tell each other.

And common courtesy seemed to have been removed from day-to-day dealings with customers. Companies were no longer prepared to ask ‘how are we doing’? The prototype of ServiceTick was called How was it for you? In hindsight, we can see why the name didn’t test too well.

More traditional ways of capturing feedback tend to measure the two extremes of customer satisfaction. The only clients likely to respond are those who have had either had a really positive experience or a really negative experience. And other insight mechanisms can prove to be costly, labour intensive and slow to deliver results.

So ServiceTick started out with quite a pure intention in terms of simply helping organisations to hear what their customers were saying, and a desire to find out what the majority of customers were thinking rather than the vocal minority. Gaining this mass of insight becomes hugely interesting. Acting on the insight can lead to increased levels of conversion, retention and customer service.

But the more we got into it, the more we’ve added other features and benefits to ServiceTick so that the product has evolved into what it is today – a means of monitoring and benchmarking business performance across any distribution channel in your company.