Where are Customer Service Rating Systems?

mugnyte asks: "There are various ways to watch single complaints congeal into a groundswell of 'market issue' (Badware add-ons, Sony root-kit, AOL un-install, etc) via blogs and google numbers, but I'm finding no sites that rate Customer Service on an ongoing basis. I'm looking for something like the home-service-industry Angie's List or perhaps Tom's Hardware guide, but on the topic of Customer Service. Is there anyone doing the hard work to gather and legitimately rate companies by their quality of service?"

BBB

[Ruff_ilb]

It's been around for a while, and it's called the Better Business Bureau. You can view ongoing complaints for not only things in your physical location, but they also have an online component (http://www.bbbonline.org/).

Now, it doesn't support all sorts of businesses, but it's easy to see if one company has bad customer service.

Gripe2Ed

[musicon]

It looks like the site (and the author) has been mostly reabsorbed by InfoWorld, but Ed Foster's http://www.gripe2ed.com/ [gripe2ed.com] blog/site has a history of collecting such information, and the http://www.gripewiki.com/ [gripewiki.com] also has areas with specific vendors listed (although the lists are woefully incomplete) -- in fact, I'd probably recommend skipping the wiki entirely unless you just have time to burn.

There really isn't one

[scronline]

The problem with things like this is they don't usually work. BBB is worthless almost to the point that it should be dismantled as it does NOTHING for the consumer.

In the S.F. Bay area there used to be a program called "Value Star". It is still out there, and they have asked us to join like we were once members, but it fails miserably in what it is suppose to do as well. They do a good job of checking out each of their members and assigning a rating. However the business must be a member and pay dues. If they aren't a member, they don't get tracked. On top of that, there is really very little incentive for a business to be a member. My company was a full fledged member before I was an owner years ago. Not once did we ever have a customer tell us they came to us because we were gold star rated or found us on the value star website. Any consumer I asked about it had never heard of Value Star. So their point of helping consumers find good service providers fails simply because the consumer isn't aware of them. Plus it doesn't help that they have closed the doors on several occasions without warning but still sent out invoices for dues.

I was actually going to start something that was free and wiki-like in the hopes of having a good site for people to rate and find rating on companies nation wide, but sadly, I didn't have the time. That and thinking more about it I've realized that the only time people will look/use something like that is when they're getting bad service. Very few people actually take the time to say anything good about a company. When they get what they expect they stay silent. Hence the phrase "1 unhappy customer speaks louder than 500 happy ones".

Value Star has a good idea, but they don't do enough marketing for people to actually know it exists so it's a poor value for a business which of course means no businesses such as myself are members. And that means we're not rated good or bad.