IT Vendor Raves

Top 5 things I learned exhibiting at TechEd 2008

I just returned from 4 days at the Microsoft TechEd conference in Orlando.  Here are some observations

1) Customers continue to compliment as well as complain about their vendors.

     The raters at TechEd were thoughtful and diligent. They really wanted to share both their good and bad vendor experiences with others.

2)      Good vendors don't ignore their bad scores. A few well known vendors took some big rating “lumps” during the show. Their management dropped in to learn about the VendorRate system. They really wanted to know areas to improve. This echoes a conversation I had with a senor sales exec at a Fortune 100 company a few weeks ago. When I asked his biggest challenge, he answered “My #1 problem is in understanding what the customers are really thinking about us.”

3)      Ease promotes use. 

       We had several “serial” raters who evaluated 3-5 vendors each of the four days. They commented how the standardized rating form made rating vendors easier each time they used the form, and how it made them think more deeply about some of our rating criteria.The more frequently someone rates, the easier it is to rate the next vendor.

4)       Rating comments are a source of buried treasure.

     If a rater takes a few extra moments to enter comments, the rating's value increases exponentially.  We think this is so important, that we are changing the comment field titled "Product or Brands Used" to be a required field.  We will also be moving all comment boxes below the rating grid to prompt users to enter comments more frequently.

5)      The attendees at TechEd were the absolute sweet spot for gathering rating information on vendors.

The attendees seemed particularly motivated to rate vendors compared to other shows. In our first 100 days of being live, this was the best group by far and away. These are the workers who came to learn hands-on at the labs. They are also the implementers, those who get things done and keep the systems running smoothly for their organization.  I thought this group was generally more committed to remain actively involved for the duration of the event. 

6)      (BONUS) The bottom of a mouse pad can be used as a great jar opener!

Yes, it’s true. The rubberized bottom of a mouse pad is perfect for opening tight jar lids. Try it!    Then ask me to send you a VendorRate dual function mouse pad and jar opener J

A big thank you to everone at TechEd. We'll be back. 

And to anyone wondering which vendors got the best scores, I'll be posting TechEd results later this weekend

Microsoft TechEd 2008 - The Frenzy

It's the morning after Microsoft's Partner Expo evening reception.  It was extremely busy all night, and we were near seating capacity in our little 10x10 rating booth for much of the time.  It was very helpful for me to look over the shoulders of first time raters, and I observed a few spots on the rating form where people repeatedly paused to ask questions.   

Users usually don’t tell you where they get stuck, and on the web, they’ll often just move on to another page or leave the website altogether. Last night was a great education for me, and we'll be making minor tweaks to the website in the coming weeks to help speed users through the rating process.   I may also embed 10-20 second video commentaries that quickly answer frequently asked questions.

And “the frenzy” doesn’t just describe the schwag-hungry crowd last night. It also refers to

1) The ongoing battle all exhibitors experienced trying to keep our internet connections live as Microsoft and the Convention Center internet provider crashed each other’s systems. 

2) Driving to the convention through the worst thunderstorms I’ve seen in 10 years, resulting tornado warnings a mere 30 miles away

Vendor Raves- Making life easy on the IT customer

Hello to the renamed VendorRaves blog.   

The Institute of Supply Management for Silicon Valley has asked us to share new vendor selection tools such as VendorRate at an upcoming lunch meeting. Their email announcement went out with an obvious typo in the first sentence. Now, here's the rub... it's my typo. ISMSV asked me to help them create the promotional email, and they thought well enough of our content to copy and paste it into their email blast as written.

This got me thinking. It was obvious that the group was time constrained, and they were only able to launch the email quickly because we had done the work for them.  And then I remembered the numerous times my companies have received "Top Vendor" honors because we did as much work as possible for the user.   

It's more than just customer service, it's more than good communication, and it's more than just quality. Vendors get rave reviews when they make functionality EASY. IT Vendors get top ratings when a vendor understands what the business customer really wants to accomplish and then does most of the heavy lifting. 

And guess what?  Customers are willing to overlook a small flaw, the tiny imperfection, or a minor typo when companies meet their major needs. In fact, they don't even see them! 

New Blog Name- IT Vendor Raves

I’m a bit of a Peter Pan.

Just yesterday, I scraped my knee falling off my bike. Of course, the cost of my toys is a bit higher than when I was younger. Thank goodness my carbon Trek bike is ok J 

My real point is that I refuse to grow up gracefully. I believe my youthful spirit has helped me adapt and thrive in this rapidly changing technology climate while others much younger than I are stuck using yesterday technologies.

However, despite the youthful twinkle in my eyes (lined with crow’s feet), it’s time for this blog to mature with dignity. As much as I like the insider joke of the White Shirt Tales title, I’m going to be change title to one more relevant and meaningful to business community.   Since we’re going to be talking about business IT customer satisfaction and highlighting top performing vendors, this blog will now be called IT Vendor Raves. (and yes, we own the VendorRaves.com domain.)

So long White Shirt Tales- It’s been an fun insider joke. Hello to IT Vendor Raves.

IT Vendor Ratings- Data quality vs. incentives

My response to the bMighty blog about using rating incentives

Thank you for your comments regarding VendorRate’s offering of Starbucks & American Express gift cards to induce B2B customers to rate their technology vendors.

Wow, talk about unintended consequences! 

VendorRate was recently created to help provide helpful and FREE information to IT departments of all sizes. We recognize the value of people’s time, so we thought we’d thank them for taking a few minutes out of their day to contribute to a new site. This was intended as a small token of our appreciation. We never thought a $5 coffee card would call into question the integrity of the very rating data VendorRate is creating.

We now realize that leading with a Starbucks Card incentive, regardless of dollar value, may create the impression that we pay for ratings. This is the polar opposite of our core philosophy of rating integrity. We have removed the Starbucks offer from our homepage, and our home page offer is now one of reciprocity; “Rate a Vendor, get a month of free VendorRate reports.” We will also continue to say "thank you” to IT users only with a small incentive reminder to complete their initial registration process. However, we’ll communicate that to the user after they have rated a vendor.

The integrity of the rating data is our primary concern. We are not a  social networking site seeking eyeballs. "Crowdsourcing" models that drive participation through incentives work well if you do not care about the quality of the information.  However, we want to provide reliable data that companies can use to make decisions when doing vendor reviews. If a company wants to compare vendors prior to making a decision, the information must be from a trusted source.   VendorRate is committed to being such a trusted and independent source of vendor ratings.

Special thanks to Benjamin Tomkins of bMighty.com for bringing this to our attention

VendorRate- Voice of customer rankings for important IT purchases

VendorRate again from bMighty.com

Smaller businesses rely on partners to design, customize, install, support, and service their technology needs from infrastructure to customer-facing applications and everything in between. That makes the choice of vendor every bit as crucial, as the software, hardware, and services they provide. There are myriad reasons to select a particular vendor, but the latest third-party data on their quality could help inform a tough decision.

The bottom-up rank by community model is one way to wade through the sea of vendors. VendorRate provides exactly that type of ranking and recently announced new functionality at Interop Las Vegas....

[Read more from That's One Way To Choose A Technology Vendor | bMighty.com: Blogs For Small Business and Mid-Sized Business]

Seagate Partners with VendorRate at Embedded SV Conference

As an unknown startup, the opportunity to partner with a large global company only 8 weeks after "go-live" would have been a pipe dream back when we were discussing the VendorRate concept.  So when a Seagate senior manager invited VendorRate to participate at a trade show inside the Seagate booth as an independent rating service, we jumped at the chance.  We thought, “We’d be honored just to stand somewhere over in a dark corner of your booth just for the privilege of being included”   

 

Then Seagate informed us that we weren’t going to be shuffled off to a remote area at the rear of the booth, we would actually occupy 15 feet of the main aisle …..oh, and please bring 4 laptops as rating stations... and yes please make a 6 foot big banner that reads “Rate Seagate Here”….and please provide the booth additional signage to promote the VendorRate independent rating service.

WOW!   We would have been happy next to the outhouse, and Seagate put us in the penthouse! 

 

I have always believed that customer satisfaction is essential to building a top notch company. but it has become even more apparent that the great corporations are serious… in fact, they are almost desperate… to learn how their customers really feel about them.  Not only is customer satisfaction important as a way of improving business practices, it's a vital component in growing an organization. The best companies are looking for new methods to demonstrate to prospects that they dedicated to outstanding customer experience.  I can think of no better way to prove a company’s excellence than by publishing the collective voice of their customer base. Believability comes not from merely disclosing the best customer comments, the most powerful form of credibility is established by presenting total customer feedback including the great and the mediocre. In fact, the presence of a few negative comments actually gives the positive ratings much more credence and authority.

 

Most importantly, the prospective purchaser can gain true and meaningful information when they can see all ratings including the good, the bad, and the ugly . And using VendorRate’s easy reporting functions, prospects can begin to see how “companies like me” feel about Seagate in order to make an informed vendor selection.. (By the way,  stay tuned, there are some real whizbang announcements about VendorRate reporting coming soon.)

 

Our first partnership was the win/win/win we always knew it would be.  Seagate won because they received solid customer feedback that was real,  and the ratings did show that Seagate is not 100% perfect. Prospective customers win because they now have a trusted source of information about  Seagate any time they want to open a browser. And VendorRate wins because we now have our first rating “partnership” with a vendor. And what a partner they are!  Thanks to  Sandra Davis, Bill Clark,  Kristi Fitzpatrick, and the rest of the Seagate booth team.

 

 

Disclaimer-  All ratings are posted on the VendorRate site regardless of favorable or unfavorable scoring.  VendorRate does not accept any sponsorship, funding, advertising, or special treatment from vendors or partners.  Rater name and company is 100% confidential.

 

When the irresistible force meets the immovable object

There are many different ways this concept can be stated … paradox, oxymoron, dynamic tension. But no matter how elegantly you try to express yourself, it really just means you are stuck. Finding your way through these sticky situations is what makes business so fascinating. Some people love crossword puzzles, others play Sudoku, but I love the opportunity to try to unravel these Gordian knots.

Let me share one of the biggest challenges we faced when we created VendorRate.  The issue was how to make it easy to rate while maintaining the integrity of the data.  The easier it is for anyone to rate, the more likely the ratings inaccurate. (Like we don’t know some people will want to game the system!) But the more we tighten up identity controls in our registration process, the fewer ratings we would get.

So we were stuck between a rock and a hard place, right?  Not quite! We’ve completed three initiatives that make rating easy while still only permitting verified business users to rate.

1)      First Rate- We’ve reversed the workflow of our rating process, so a user can now rate a vendor BEFORE registering. First Rate lets a new user experience the rating process first and then decide to move on to the next step of verifying that they are a real business user.  The First Rate process is more like using an online shopping cart where you try it, then buy it.  The rating won’t post until a new user verifies their business email address, but they will get to see how easy our “3 Minutes or Less” rating system is to use.

2)      Mass Registration for Corporate IT Departments- Another new and speedy way we are validating business raters is by permitting IT and telecom departments to register their users en masse.  Since one of our primary identity verifications is a valid business email address, we concluded that an IT department is really our ultimate source of validation.  We are now allowing IT departments to bypass the individual registration process, giving speedier access to all their employees with email addresses from the main domain. In order to create an even deeper layer of user privacy, we don’t even ask for the names of the user, just the email address.

Like Alexander’s bold stroke of slicing the knot in half, these two initiatives help VendorRate gather more ratings faster without sacrificing the quality of rater integrity.

Top 5 things we learned at VON.x2008

Notes from the first public unveiling of VendorRate at the VON (Voice Over Network) show in Silicon Valley March 18-20. We normally don’t get to watch hundreds of raters in action, and user feedback stimulated some great enhancements that are keeping our development team working around the clock.  Here are my top 5 takeaways from the show.

1)   The time has come for a confidential rating system for B2B IT & Telecom- According to everyone we spoke with, the VendorRate system is sorely needed in the marketplace.  Nobody told us this doesn’t have “legs.”    Every user we spoke with needed help in identifying great vendors and avoiding those vendors with marginal customer satisfaction

2)  Raters were fair.  Many good ratings came in. Raters gave equal voice when complimenting great vendors and when offering candid feedback on vendors who had a pattern of ignoring them. As one senior exec raved about a hardware vendor, “I just love these guys!”

3)   Some vendors were excited about the idea of free public ratings, and some vendors wanted to flee the scene.  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to tell us which vendors had the happiest customers; they were the vendors asking us if they could send out VendorRate links to all their customers.

4) Surprise!  Not everyone wants a $5 Starbucks card when they rate a vendor. Many raters wanted to rate because, to quote one director of a mid-sized company, “this is for our own good!”

5) VendorRate’s extensive experience in B2B technology really shines through. Nobody walking down the aisles at 10:05am on the first day of VON could tell that our company was in its first 5 minutes of public life!  Our team worked with clients as if we’d been doing it together for years. Score one for the old timers…those of us over the age of 30!

Thick Skin

Listening to customer feedback is a learned experience. Nobody wants to be told they have an “ugly baby,” and while our human instinct of fight-or-flight may protect us from predators, those responses are counter-productive if you are hoping to build customer loyalty. After all, customers aren’t apt to listen to YOU until you have listened to them. 

Executives, usually eager to heard good news, must learn develop thick skin when confronted with less than stellar feedback.  Because we are often far removed from the front line experience, we must retrain ourselves to hear criticism that is often laced with emotion.  And it’s only when we listen to customers that we learn how to develop their loyalty.

I experienced a great example of how being thick skinned builds loyalty at SVB (Silicon Valley Bank) the other day.   In a meeting full of clients, one of the directors asked for feedback regarding one of their online systems.   My response had the impact of a hand grenade as I tossed in a very direct and harsh comment.  Other users, emboldened by my candid answer, joined in and mentioned 4-5 other problems they experienced.     Tim Toller of SVB resisted the urge to defend the problem, and instead acknowledged a few initiatives SVB had in place to improve the process. Tim then asked all of us to join a focus group to help out even further. Rather than wilt under the pressure, he invited us to participate more. Talk about earning my trust!

I left the meeting feeling as if my voice had been heard. Had I been answering VendorRate’s questions regarding communication and customer feedback, I would have scored them a 9!