Today, we’ve announced the first in a series of tools which will help companies of all sizes offer customer service excellence. For starters, we’re focusing on the SME market with the launch of utellus:commit, a simple customer service tool for small and medium sized businesses looking to reinforce their commitment to the highest levels of customer service.

To celebrate our appearance as a finalist in the 2007 Western Mail Business Awards, we’re offering SMEs a free 12-month subscription to this service, for a limited time.

Phillipe de Wilde, CEO of utellus Limited, says: “This is a really simple way for SMEs to get ahead of the competition. Subscriber companies put our logo on the ‘contact us’ page of their website – clicking our logo takes the customer into an easy-to-use feedback form which they complete and submit.”

“There are two key advantages to the SME: firstly by using an independent and neutral service to process their feedback, the customer is reassured that their opinions really do matter; second, utellus will chase companies where feedback is not answered, helping them to ensure that they always address their customers’ comments in a timely and effective way. The company’s responses are stored in the customer’s personalised message centre in utellus.co.uk, which makes it easy for them to see progress.”

Since we launched in December 2006, utellus has in the last two months entered into arrangements to provide tailored feedback services for household names like Vodafone, Avis and Cunard.

De Wilde adds: “Our goal is to help businesses of all sizes improve their customer service. We all know that many of our largest companies struggle to keep a personal relationship with their customers. However, as they grow, many smaller businesses find it increasingly difficult to maintain previous high standards of customer service. We can help them keep their eyes on the ball – simply email us at commit@utellus.co.uk.”

Vodafone has been in touch with us to ensure that your feedback to them gets addressed as quickly as possible by the most appropriate team. At their request we made a few changes to the Vodafone feedback form, and we’ve now completed a series of tests to ensure that your utellus feedback gets to the right people.

Phillipe de Wilde, utellus CEO, says: “Large companies spend huge amounts of money trawling the web looking for unhappy customers on blogs and chatrooms. utellus now gives those customers the opportunity to express their concerns in the knowledge that their feedback will be taken seriously. Additionally Vodafone has asked that we let them know if your feedback is going unanswered, which we will do.”

If you have feedback for Vodafone, either good or bad, we can direct it for you. All we ask is utellus.

Transparency is key to earning customers’ trust; open and clear communication is one of the building blocks of transparency, clear organisational structure is another.

Any company which deals with the public should have a nominated and named contact. A terrific example of this kind of openness — not just in terms of sharing of information but also willingness to communicate with the customer base — can be seen in Warburton’s recent television campaign which give you the name and email address of Jonathan and Brett Warburton, currently at the helm of the family-owned business.

How can a company claim to be committed to customer service when the policy handed down from the ivory tower of Human Resources states that customers should not be informed of the name of their customer service manager? It seems almost unthinkable in the current business climate that a company would take such a defensive position to a fairly innocent enquiry, and yet this is the route that a major dairy foods provider, Dairy Crest Ltd, has opted for. Little wonder then that its customers are turning to utellus to resolve their customer service issues, and utellus is on the case.